One thing that I'd suggest is that you try it out before you install it. Download Linux Mint, or Linux Lite, or whatever distro you've chosen. Mint would be my suggestion. Anyway, when you do, you'll be downloading an ISO image, which is basically a CD image. You'll then need to burn it to disk or to a USB drive. There's a free burner I've heard people refer to called Rufus. After you burn it then you reboot your computer, during the reboot you should see the BIOS screen where it says to press F2 to go into setup or 12 to choose the boot menu (your words and options may differ from what I have here). Choose the boot menu option and you should get a menu to choose which device to boot to, choose whichever media you burned the ISO to. It'll then load up Linux and give you a working playground. Unfortunately with this method nothing will be remembered everytime you reboot. But this is good because you can't break anything either. So do whatever you want, if you break it, reboot. Once you decide you like it and want to move forward, follow the instructions in arochester's message above for dual booting. Dual booting will allow you to have both Windows and Linux on your hard drive.