Definitely not countries I want my private anything sourced out of right now lol

Okay a 2010 MacBook does make it more complicated. That’s pre retina though so it might be okay, but on a laptop Linux gets harder.

I never received a notification for this message, I apologize. You should definitely be able to use a USB yourself, https://etcher.balena.io/ is the software to make it when you choose your operating system.

I would look into a virtual machine first to try it out. It will be shockingly boring once it’s up and running and it’ll be slower than if you installed it on your hardware. Try out https://www.virtualbox.org/

You should do what’s within your budget for buying a computer, I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy something they can’t justify. It helps to know what hardware you have instead of using an all in one setup but there are other people who have used those setups and you may be able to find help more easily. It can be a toss up.

I’ll give you a more proper response in the morning, sorry I missed this! Still learning Lemmy

Incompatibility problems with hardware? Nvidia isn’t great but it still works. What hardware do you have?

Have you used a virtual machine?

I would recommend Ubuntu because there is the most help for it available online. Googling questions with “Ubuntu” at the end of it will yield better results than other distributions but your mileage may vary. There are plenty of other options but Ubuntu is the most straightforward, and if you don’t like it you can try something else.

If you want to install it on your hardware you should look up “How to make linux live USB”

I don’t want to be rude but I feel like you’re overthinking the whole thing. If you want to play around with it just look up “how to make a linux virtual machine” and that will show you how to make one without losing your files.

If you want to use it as your main operating system you should make a backup of all your files first. Just throwing them on an external hard drive should be sufficient in most use cases.

Let me know if you have more specific questions, I know I didn’t answer everything in your post but feel free to let me know. I’m not a Linux power user or someone who works with it for a living but someone who made the switch 10+ years ago and has gotten by as a regular user pretty well.