Here is the video version, if you prefer it:
In this article, I will explain how to install Linux on your machine. I will assume you are installing Debian (Debian 9 to be specific), but most likely any Linux distribution will have a similar installation process. If not, there is a website called Google, through which you can find guides that guide you through the specifics of your installation.
When I installed Debian on my PC, I pretty much just clicked “Next” all the time. I used the default settings. Nothing fancy. The only setting up I had to do was when I was creating my partitions. Partitions are subdivisions of your hard disk drive or your solid state drive. Partitions enable you, so to speak, divide up your disk into different compartments. We will talk more about this later on, but a guide I used for this (and you can use for this) is (Trivedi, n.d.).
There is also one thing I was uncertain about, which is swap. Swap is a part of your hard disk drive (and when I say hard disk drive, I mean solid state drive as well, if you have one) that you can use if you run out of Random Access Memory (RAM). So for example, if I have 8 Gigabytes (GB) of RAM, and if I need 9 GB to run all my processes (since all processes reside in RAM) I need 1 additional GB of RAM. That additional 1 GB gets taken from the swap space. Swap space is also used when you hibernate your computer. (“SwapFaq,” n.d.) I found a really good guideline for swap space here – (“I have 16GB RAM. Do I need 32GB swap?,” n.d.). The second answer from the top contains a nice table. There are other guides on this website called Google, feel free to use them, but in general I think that if your swap is at least the size of your RAM, that’s going to be fine.
A note: You can also install Linux on a virtual machine and learn how to use Linux via a virtual machine, or maybe you can have a dual boot with both Windows and Linux and slowly switch over to Linux. I personally found those approaches to be less effective. The reason was that I would keep using Windows over Linux, even though I knew I should use Linux. Maybe for you this will work, so I am mentioning it here.
A Google search for “How to set up Linux on VirtualBox” (VirtualBox is used for virtualization) can help you set that up.
Hope this helped!
References
I have 16GB RAM. Do I need 32GB swap? (n.d.). Retrieved December 22, 2019, from https://askubuntu.com/questions/49109/i-have-16gb-ram-do-i-need-32gb-swap
SwapFaq. (n.d.). Retrieved December 22, 2019, from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
Trivedi, Y. (n.d.). How to Choose a Partition Scheme for Your Linux PC. Retrieved December 22, 2019, from https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/35676/how-to-choose-a-partition-scheme-for-your-linux-pc/