I just downloaded rufus and a mint iso, here’s a couple screen grabs.

Launch rufus, and plug in your usb stick, it should show up under device.

From there click select on the right side. Browse to where you have the ISO you got from the linux mint website and select it.

Once you get back to the other screen hit start.

You shouldn’t need to mess with any settings unless you are using secure boot.

Once that’s done, you should restart and boot from the USB stick. Depending on the model of your laptop there are different methods to get into the bios to change the settings to allow booting from usb. If it goes into grub mode it will look like a command prompt with a few selections. Just hit enter on the first option and it will boot into the live usb.

Once you are in the live usb mode, it’s basically all gui to install, test, etc.

Nowadays the terminal stuff is not really needed for basic use, so you should be able to get spun up pretty easy.

The process is actually simple.

It can be a little daunting at first because it’s new, but don’t let that discourage you. You can mostly ignore the whole mirrors thing, just pick one that is geographically close to you to hopefully get a better download speed. Outside of that, all the mirrors lead to the same file just in a different physical location.

Installing another software to make a bootable drive. You can use Rufus, which has a portable version so there’s no need to install it. I put a link below, there’s one in the downloads list that says portable.

https://rufus.ie/en/

There are plenty of step by step tutorials out there, however since Linux is very open, a lot of guides may give different advice and knowing what to/not to do can feel confusing. (For instance, if you have an SSD in your computer, you really shouldn’t use a swap partition unless you absolutely have to due to limited RAM.) In most cases though you can get by with the defaults when installing something like mint.

That being said. You could simply make the boot stick and try out the live version of the OS before committing to wiping any of your drives to install the OS. Just know that running the live version from the boot stick will be slow, it may take a little time for things to boot which is normal since you are running the os off of a USB stick.

If you would like some help I could try to give you some guidance. I would just want to know the specs/model of your computer so I can make sure I lead you in the right direction.

Capitalism baby. Can’t have you producing your own stuff when the corporations can sell it to you at 10x the price.

Hopping on a live USB to recover files is your safest option.

It will also give you an opportunity to scan files (with something like clam av) while running from a system other than Windows, so you’re less likely to encounter any further infections. Not that Linux can’t be infected, it’s just much less likely and you’d be running from a flash drive and off network anyway so it’s about as safe as you can get.

You would need to connect the live USB to the Internet to install clam av on the USB stick or something similar, but that can be done while using a separate machine before actually plugging into the affected machine.

I can’t really offer any advice on using any software for scanning as I keep personal things on separate drives segregated from the network so if something ever did happen I’d just wipe and start over.

May be a good idea to take though. Get him a USB drive that he can store files on and disconnect when he doesn’t need it.

Just some thoughts from someone that works in desktop support and has been tinkering for a little over 20 years.

Good luck!

Try using a USB boot stick to boot into Linux and just save whatever you need from the machine and then reformat it. Since this way the machine won’t automatically connect to Wi-Fi and potentially cause more issues.

That’s the quickest, simplest way without needing to try to diagnose and dig into the system to see what is affected and trying to fix it.

Also what is the computer doing when it boots up? There’s not really enough information being given to be able to provide any other advice.

Mustard, yes!

I love some good mustard potato salad.

Because your 0$ per month after dropping them doesn’t hurt their bottom line.

Corporations generally weigh the risks and the benefit often wins out and they make more money because there are enough people that either reluctantly cave into the fee increase, forgot about their subscription or just don’t care that it’s going up.

It’s fairly seldom (but seems to be increasing over the years) to see so much backlash that a company walks back on what they were planning to do.

バービ sounds more correct to me or バールビ (ba- ru bi) if you want the r sound but if you look it up it is shown as バービー in Japan. Strange that they would elongate the ビー.

I lived in Japan for almost 10 years, so I’m somewhat confident about that. Translations, especially phonetic ones can be a little weird sometimes.

That’s some deep fried history right there.

They probably will if they get a takedown request.

I’m guessing you are uploading US related material by your comment.

If you are concerned about it, like maybe you have an account that you don’t want to lose, then make another account and upload it.

Whoosh

You are right, it’s really not cut and dry in today’s age.

Could be something like the way I have my son’s tablet setup. If he tries to install something, I get a notification to approve it on my phone.

I can disable or enable the device at any point and have active times setup on it so it automatically does that if I’m not manually managing it.

BUT, that requires the parent to be actively engaging in what their kids are doing while trying to not be helicopters over them. You can setup home networks to block stuff like that also, but that requires some technical knowledge that a lot of people may not want to deal with. Also, that has no bearing on what is done outside of the home.

Also the age of the kid is a huge factor, a 13 year old is going to have a higher ability to get around those restrictions.

So now we’re at the point of basically saying, there’s not a really good defined way of doing that. However, if we ask for a copy of your ID, that’s adds a decent protective layer. BUUUT, that’s going to throw up red flags to everyone who wants to protect themselves and doesn’t want their info out there like that. Which we all know there are data breaches and bad actors out there (like Tesla employees sharing videos from people’s cars) so it’s reasonable to not want to provide stuff like that.

Now at this point we’re kinda back to square one what can be done to manage this, be secure, and appease both sides of the table?

That’s a really fair point.

My wife is Asian and I definitely understand the conservative side of many Asian cultures, also the immigration policies as I lived in Asia for almost a decade.

Sometimes it can be hard to see the different viewpoints when you aren’t directly affected. For one reason obviouly, not being Asian myself (mixed but I’m basically white), and two, even having many Asian friends but never actually really discussing politics with them.

I really appreciate the time you took to give some external viewpoints to things.

Yup,

Strangest thing to me is that I know quite a few Asians that immigrated here that are super Trumpers. I just can’t even grasp how.

Also, interestingly enough, I also happen to work in a very right leaning field, and the majority of the republicans here have been very quiet since the Jan 6 incident. There was only one who was pretty outspoken about it, and he quit recently.

My old apartment complex tried to do something similar. We had the carpets deep cleaned the day before the end of our lease.

They straight up told me they were charging me because their maintenance came in after we moved to do some work and it was their policy to have it cleaned again from the mess that THEIR maintenance people left and charge us.

I told them that they had just admitted to fraud, as they were trying to charge us for a problem that they caused after our lease had already expired.

I got my deposit back.

I’m running a 3060 on an ultrawide and it’s fine as long as you aren’t using ray tracing.

Edit: you can get away with ray tracing if you turn the distance down a good bit. Saw your other post in Linux gaming, I also run Linux and Windows side by side and this is referring to performance with both.

The Boy and The Heron