If you are a bit confused by my ramblings (or anyone else's for that matter) on how to install Linux on your machine, let me give you a quick crash course.
Installing Linux can be done on a working machine that you use all the time - it doesn't need to be an old beater that you sacrifice. Any working machine will do if it powers on.
Installing Linux is not going to burn your system permanently, it is just a temporary thing that can be undone by switching off your computer and rebooting.
If you go to that page I linked above, choose a distro for your computer (64 bit or 32 bit etc. ). Take the time to check the hash of the download if you can, but don't worry too much about that now. In fact, when you do this properly you should check the hash twice! But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
So you have gone to the link I put above, you have chose your particular flavour of 'distro'. What do you do next? Why, you burn it to CD/DVD and then when you have done that, you boot the computer with the CD/DVD in the drive so it boots from there in stead of your hard drive. You may need to change the boot order of your bios but this is easy enough.
When you burn the .iso of your distro, I would also recommend that you use a program like imgburn, as it does proper burns with little mess ups, but ymmv. Use a proper burning program wtf you do.
So, you have your .iso image downloaded, properly burned to CD, and you know how to boot from there in to that system. Voila! Pretty soon you will have a fully running Linux system going on.
But even when you get this set up, it is still not a proper working system as you will have no 'persistence' which just means you can not save any work or downloads you do. Most the time this is a good thing, but it's probably not what you want from a system you are using every day. For that you need to burn your image to SD card or a partition on the hard drive, or perhaps just a USB stick.
I had a great system on a win7 laptop that booted from a SD card with Linux Mint 10 Katya iirc. Worked for over a year, every day flawless. Then one day, the Linux gods nuked it and it was all gone. Nothing lasts for ever, but Linux lasts even less.
One thing with Linux is that it is constantly writing to your disk so that kills SD cards and USB sticks. Don't expect them to last forever. When you find a distro you like, partition your hard drive and put it on there. But this can be tricky, as windows always takes the first partition and overwrites everything. It is not gone however, but you need to know how to use grub to get it back. Grub is a partition manager. With a bit of work you can get a fully functioning windows/linux system dual booting on a laptop or desktop. You can make it autoboot windows or linux, or give you the choice etc. etc. - See Dedoimedo for Grub tutorials.
None of this is advanced stuff. I'm sure many here have done this a thousand times. If you need help or you are trying to do a specific thing, I'm sure someone here could help you out quicker than at some of linux forums. They are hardcore: dude read the fucking manual. And you are like, dude, I did read the fucking manual. And they are like, well dude, still read it again anyway, like, fuck. ;-)
Fucking spergs. Where would we be without them, eh?
TL;DR: You can download and burn a CD that will run on your current system to check out Linux. It will either boot in to ram or run off the CD for a live session. You can check if Linux is working for you with this. If you like it, you can make it more permanent by burning the OS (operating system) to Usb stick or SD card or partition your hd (hard disk).
It costs nothing, takes little time to do when you get a hang of it, and can open up a whole new world. It's something you could conceivably do in a couple of hours off in the evening. Pretty soon, you are checking out Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and distros that load in to RAM like Knoppix or Partition Magic. And when you get a distro that loads to RAM, you will experience a whole new world of snappiness that you never knew existed. It's a wonderful world. And we haven't even got in to using Linux for obfuscation or subterfuge or shenanigans yet, but first things first...
Installing Linux can be done on a working machine that you use all the time - it doesn't need to be an old beater that you sacrifice. Any working machine will do if it powers on.
Installing Linux is not going to burn your system permanently, it is just a temporary thing that can be undone by switching off your computer and rebooting.
If you go to that page I linked above, choose a distro for your computer (64 bit or 32 bit etc. ). Take the time to check the hash of the download if you can, but don't worry too much about that now. In fact, when you do this properly you should check the hash twice! But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
So you have gone to the link I put above, you have chose your particular flavour of 'distro'. What do you do next? Why, you burn it to CD/DVD and then when you have done that, you boot the computer with the CD/DVD in the drive so it boots from there in stead of your hard drive. You may need to change the boot order of your bios but this is easy enough.
When you burn the .iso of your distro, I would also recommend that you use a program like imgburn, as it does proper burns with little mess ups, but ymmv. Use a proper burning program wtf you do.
So, you have your .iso image downloaded, properly burned to CD, and you know how to boot from there in to that system. Voila! Pretty soon you will have a fully running Linux system going on.
But even when you get this set up, it is still not a proper working system as you will have no 'persistence' which just means you can not save any work or downloads you do. Most the time this is a good thing, but it's probably not what you want from a system you are using every day. For that you need to burn your image to SD card or a partition on the hard drive, or perhaps just a USB stick.
I had a great system on a win7 laptop that booted from a SD card with Linux Mint 10 Katya iirc. Worked for over a year, every day flawless. Then one day, the Linux gods nuked it and it was all gone. Nothing lasts for ever, but Linux lasts even less.
One thing with Linux is that it is constantly writing to your disk so that kills SD cards and USB sticks. Don't expect them to last forever. When you find a distro you like, partition your hard drive and put it on there. But this can be tricky, as windows always takes the first partition and overwrites everything. It is not gone however, but you need to know how to use grub to get it back. Grub is a partition manager. With a bit of work you can get a fully functioning windows/linux system dual booting on a laptop or desktop. You can make it autoboot windows or linux, or give you the choice etc. etc. - See Dedoimedo for Grub tutorials.
None of this is advanced stuff. I'm sure many here have done this a thousand times. If you need help or you are trying to do a specific thing, I'm sure someone here could help you out quicker than at some of linux forums. They are hardcore: dude read the fucking manual. And you are like, dude, I did read the fucking manual. And they are like, well dude, still read it again anyway, like, fuck. ;-)
Fucking spergs. Where would we be without them, eh?
TL;DR: You can download and burn a CD that will run on your current system to check out Linux. It will either boot in to ram or run off the CD for a live session. You can check if Linux is working for you with this. If you like it, you can make it more permanent by burning the OS (operating system) to Usb stick or SD card or partition your hd (hard disk).
It costs nothing, takes little time to do when you get a hang of it, and can open up a whole new world. It's something you could conceivably do in a couple of hours off in the evening. Pretty soon, you are checking out Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and distros that load in to RAM like Knoppix or Partition Magic. And when you get a distro that loads to RAM, you will experience a whole new world of snappiness that you never knew existed. It's a wonderful world. And we haven't even got in to using Linux for obfuscation or subterfuge or shenanigans yet, but first things first...