Recommendations needed

MEH6336

MEH6336

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I am motivated to install some Linux distro for the first time. currently I am using Windows. I have HP Elitebook 2560p (a Core i7 2nd gen laptop with 4 gb of RAM and 500gb hard drive). I am interested in either of ElementryOS, Linux Mint, or otherwise Ubuntu. I am confused about the driver availability and about my data on my other partitions of Hard Drive and more then 2tb data on my external hard drives. Now my questions are: (1) which of ElementryOS, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu will easily be installed on my HP Elitebook 2560p without driver issues. (2) My hard drive have 2 partitions; C:/ and D://. The D:/ Partition has important data on it. Will I have to format whole of my hard drive or only C:/ is required to be formatted? (3) Can I connect my external hard drives (which have FAT32 file system and contain a huge data) with Linux without formatting them?
 
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You can run Linux on just about any PC ever made as far as I know. But if you are new to Linux I would keep windows around as a familiar.
Run A dual boot system get the best of both I was messing with the idea of throwing Mac on my PC just for fun. Welcome to the world of Linux!
 
MEH6336 said:
which of ElementryOS, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu will easily be installed on my HP Elitebook 2560p without driver issues.
Click to expand...

Have you taken a look at Linux Lite which is aimed to ease the transition from Windows to Linux MX-Linux is also a very good distro. Now, IMHO from those 3 you mentioned Mint's the one. Regarding drivers, most modern distros install all drivers, open source ones, but if the manufacturer of some of your hardware supports Linux then I suggest you check that first. For example, if your hp has an AMD gpu check in the amd site whether or not there is a driver for it, do the same with the rest of your hardware. But to be honest open source drivers works just fine and in some cases even better so you probably won't need to install anything else, however, if you want to make sure, create a live usb and boot from it, in mint you'll choose "start Linux Mint" in Ubuntu, as far as I remember choose "Try Ubuntu without installing" can't remember about Elementary but I do believe is similar to Ubuntu. Basically, most distros offer the option to boot directly from the USB/CD/DVD so you can try before actually installing on your pc and by doing so making sure everything works as expected as well as to decide, in your case, which distro to install. Also, you could install virtualbox and try all of them; Mint, Elementary and Ubuntu as well as any other distro you want to by creating a virtual machine, which in my opinion is the safest way to try and honestly, I suggest you to try that first before attempting to install anything on the real pc. Try this tutorial which it's very easy to follow https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-in-virtualbox/

Hope this helps! :)
 
Depending on what GPU your HP Elitebook has installed ......the kernel that comes with Linux Mint should provide support. Unless your HP is that old.

Is this your machine?

HP EliteBook 2560p Notebook PC Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support

Specifications page for HP EliteBook 2560p Notebook PC.
support.hp.com support.hp.com

If so, it looks like it's an Intel HD 3000 GPU:-

If you have a Nvidia GPU you'll most likely have to install the Linux Display Driver.

Virtual Box works great for trying out distros to find the one you'd like to install.

Oracle VM VirtualBox

www.virtualbox.org www.virtualbox.org

-::-You won't have to format your whole hard drive unless you want to perform manual partitioning.-::-

With Linux Mint you can tell the installer to install alongside of your Windows os. And,.......
If I'm not mistaken Elementary OS will install alongside of Widows as well. Not sure about Ubuntu.
 
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