I second the VM approach. You can mess around, try different distros and generally just get a feel for the whole thing. If you want a dedicated machine, any old box will do. A cheap mini PC or whatever you have lying around. One of the great aspects of Linux is that a lot of old hardware that may look obsolete suddenly gets a new lease on life.

I sold my laptop and used my Steam Deck exclusively as my PC for a month before I collected all the parts for my new PC. If you’re going to use it for gaming then it makes an excellent multiple use device.

You don’t get the same experience installing on low end hardware or in a VM though

I didn’t properly get hooked until I bit the bullet and just installed it bare metal on a higher end laptop and gaming PC

Generic answer for this is to get a refurbished corporate laptop. At least in here we have several companies which buy previously leased computers and give them a refurb (new hard drive, good cleaning, things like that) and sell them for pretty good price.

W, T or X series Thinkpads are pretty safe options, my T495 was 300€(ish) on sale. L and carbon are something I’d avoid, L (at least few years back) weren’t built as well as T-series and X1 carbon doesn’t have options to expand/swap out ram.

Contrary to what others here are saying, instead of trying to install Linux on something random, I would highly recommend getting a Linux-first / Linux-friendly hardware at first instance, if possible. If not, that’s fine, you could just go for any random off-the-shelf PC, BUT you run the risk of certain things not working or perhaps not fully optimised. For instance, for laptops, one common issue is standby/sleep mode not working properly - either you may experience battery drain during sleep, or things like the graphics or audio might break after resume (or worse, might even crash). Or you may experience higher battery drain in general compared to Windows, or certain things like some Fn keys for brightness may not work etc. Certain sensors not working is another common issue, which may cause your fans to run at 100%. And if your system has an nVidia card, there’s a good chance you may run into issues - if not during installation, perhaps after a system (kernel) upgrade. These are all just examples btw, just because you’re buying something random doesn’t mean you may face these issues, but it’s something to keep in mind.

The general rule of thumb for buying Linux-friendly hw is: avoid nVidia. Both Intel and AMD onboard graphics are fine (for the most part - at least, they have a better track record than nVidia anyways).

There are some PC/laptops which come with Linux loaded out-of-the box, which would be the ideal Linux machine to buy. I call these Linux-first machines. Examples of such machines include System76, Star Labs, Slimbook Fedora, Tuxedo, Purism, Juno Computers and Entroware to name a few. There are also some laptops from mainstream OEMs which come with Linux, such as the HP Dev One and Dell XPS Developer Edition. You can’t go wrong with any of these machines, as they’re Linux-first machines and have been tested by the OEM.

Then there are Linux-friendly laptops - these are laptops which may not necessarily come with Linux, but have been either confirmed by the OEM in some capacity that they’re Linux compatible, or they’re widely supported by the community due to their Linux-friendlyness and popularity. Examples of these include the Framework laptops and Lenovo’s ThinkPad series. You generally can’t go wrong with these either.

For other machines, your compatibility can be a hit-or-a-miss. Some laptops may work fine, but might need some extra configuration steps to get it all working - eg Microsoft’s Surface laptops need a special kernel to be installed (and some additional steps to be followed, depending on your distro), but otherwise work fine once you’ve installed all the extra bits. If Linux-first/friendly laptops aren’t an option for you, you could go for something random, but you’ll need to do your research (Google/reddit search etc) and see what their compatibility is like, whether everything works, if there’s any issues etc. In fact, this would apply for most of your hardware purchases going forward. Eg, say you’re buying a printer or some external webcam, you should check for it’s Linux compatibility first before buying it.

Finally, if you want to run Linux on a device you already own - you can (generally) try it without any risk, using a Live USB (bootable). Just download the image, write it to your USB drive and boot from it - this will give you a good feel of things, and highlight any potential compatibility issues. Ventoy makes this a very easy process - just install Ventoy to your drive first, and one it’s done, you can download multiple ISOs of various Linux distributions and just copy it to your drive (no need to install them). Then you can boot from the USB and select the distro you want to try and boot from it. This is extremely handy for trying out various distros, or just keeping some “rescue” ISOs handy. You can even boot a Windows ISO from Ventoy (and other OSes too, like the BSDs).

If your budget stretches to a new laptop, framework make laptops (light weight or serious game machines) that come with Linux installed.

If you have no budget some second hand high end Chromebooks can be converted to mainstream Linux (video)

The other comments suggesting old ThinkPads are fine, but they’re heavier than I like to carry

I also recommend getting a refurbished ThinkPads for their excellent Linux support, especially newer models like the X1 Carbon. No need to worry about such and such hardware not working on Linux. Avoid models with Nvidia GPU for less maintenance headache.

You should really edit your post with what your budget is and what your requirements are if you want anything other than brand recommendations.

Pinebook Pro is rather nice, though it is low powered and some tasks will feel slow on it.

I’d say don’t use debian because GNOME environment feels restrictive. No window snapping was my biggest turn off.

I use Fedora - KDE which is really comfortable to me. Others have said Mint Cinnamon is a good one to start with.

Whichever OS you choose, when you install it, for the love of God, plug in a network cable so you can use internet on the thing as it installs. This will save you much trouble during set up.

haven’t heard much good things about the t490

Worth noting here that any even remotely modern computer supports hardware virtualization for natively running virtual machines, including laptop chips and even Apple silicon, although you usually have to enable it in the BIOS since few people need it and malware has been known to abuse it. The setting for that has various names depending on motherboard vendor but usually related to “Hardware Virtualization”, “Intel VT-d” or “AMD-V”. If for some reason your machine doesn’t, some virtual machine software also supports software emulation although be prepared to take a massive performance hit.

Also worth noting that in my experience, even with hardware virtualization, in most cases, the performance of a virtual machine in a graphical environment borders on unusable no matter what operating system is running in it, and Linux is known for its ability to run smoothly on lower spec machines than Windows can when installed on physical hardware. Also also worth noting that every Linux distribution worth its salt lets you “try before you buy” (or to be more accurate, try before you install) and experience basically the whole operating system including installing programs from within the installation media, without touching your existing OS.

(Of course, you might have better luck than I did running a virtual machine, and in the early days of your Linux journey you will DEFINITELY want a working copy of Windows you can quickly fall back on when something breaks. If you install a VM and you’re happy with how it performs, by all means, stick with that till you’re good and ready to make the next step. See how you like it, get some practice using it etc. before you make extremely-difficult-to-undo changes to your boot disk. If you want to get a bit closer to how it performs for real, but don’t trust yourself to install a new OS without accidentally erasing all your data, read on.)

You can write an ISO image to a flash drive, boot off that flash drive, close out of the installer window (it’ll drop you to the desktop) and give Linux a test drive before you install it for real. If you decide you don’t like it, unplug the flash drive and reboot your computer, and Linux will leave no trace it was ever there. (Depending on your setup (specifically laptops that use TPMs and full disk encryption) you might have to reenter your Bitlocker password (which is a ~40 character random alphanumeric string saved in your Microsoft account) to re-enable secure boot, but that’s it.)

Not everything works in a live environment – you’ll have a hard time installing graphics drivers when you haven’t installed the OS, for example, and all data/programs you create/download will be limited to the size of your RAM and wiped when you reboot – but you can get a pretty good test drive. You can get a feel for how the GUI works, customize it to your tastes, and even download and run stuff like Discord and Steam all without touching your boot disk.

If you decide you like Linux, but not enough to completely leave Windows behind (no shame in that! It’s where I started too!) you can install in a dual-boot configuration. Basically, you carve out a portion of your drive for permanent use by Linux (I recommend ~1/4 to 1/2 of the total drive space but it can be whatever you want), your Windows C: drive shrinks by that much, and you get asked which OS you want to boot into each time you restart your computer. Neither OS will be aware of the other’s existence, and from the perspective of any programs you install they will be two different computers. Linux can read and write files saved on your Windows partition, but not vice versa, so if you want to copy files between them you’ll need to boot into Linux.

Tutorials on how to set up a Linux dual boot abound online (in fact, many distros’ installers have it as the default behavior), so I won’t explain how to do it here. If you have any other Linux related questions, though, feel free to send them my way!

… there are a LOT of possible linux distributions to choose from. There are also quite a number of different desktop environments to choose from.

I never considered the backend could have different frontends. So is Ubuntu just a different desktop environment for Debian? Or is it like I could just install a different desktop environment on top of my old PC’s Ubuntu installation?

Another Mint + Thinkpad vote here. I’m a lifelong Windows user who has occasionally dabbled in Linux, and Mint is the first distro that I’ve stuck with enough to consider it my daily driver. I have it running on a used Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 with an AMD Ryzen 7 in it. I still have a separate Windows desktop for gaming and Adobe Lightroom, but the Thinkpad is my everyday couch PC now. Everything worked out of the box except for the infrared camera used for face unlock type stuff, and the fingerprint reader. I got the camera set up to use the Linux equivalent of Windows Hello, Howdy, and while it does work now it’s not as fast and reliable as it was under Windows. I haven’t even tried to set up the fingerprint reader yet. I’m very happy with how well everything works in general under Linux Mint.

I’ll also add: There’s a base distribution and then a variety of “Window Managers” (WM) or “Desktop Environments” (DE) to choose from. These determine the layout of your desktop, “control panel” analog, what settings can be tweaked, and stuff like the network/volume controls accessible him the tray etc.

Mate/Cinnamon are good, but I recommend KDE/Plasma Desktop. I’ve had good luck with that one for people who I’ve helped migrate from Windows.

Your can actually install multiple DE’s and will be able to choose which one you use at the graphical login screen.

As for Chrome, I think Google still has a repository for that or one can use Chromium which is the base experience for that anyhow.

For code editors, there’s a bunch of choices. I tend to use Pluma for basic text stuff, Bluefish for a lot of web stuff, and CodeBlocks for C++'ish stuff. You can also install VSCode on Linux if you so desire and a lot of people seem to quite like it.

Hardware I lean more towards **AMD - though not bleeding edge - as the drivers come with the OS kernel and tend to get updated with such. I’ve generally not had issues since about the RX480 days, except for some weirdness with APU’s not liking certain TVs (usually scaling issues). Nvidia generally works too, but requires a proprietary driver stub be installed for accelerated graphics and that can sometimes break on updates. Most Intel (graphics) is ok, but there have been a few issues with less-common chips in smaller fiorm-factor or tablety devices.

** I have heard people complain about some AMD stuff, but honestly I’ve run an RX480, Vega56, 6900XT, and 3-4 generations of APU’s without major issues except when those chips were fairly new (first 6mo of release can be dicey).

Though if you have an Nvidia card you should install Pop! OS or Nobara Linux since they have an Nvidia ISO so you won’t need to struggle with installing them later on.

You can make your own for just moderately expensive

It wasn’t that hard for me to flash a Chromebook with Linux using this guide

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

tutoriaLinux’s series

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.