After watching a few videos about linux distributions, in particular “Zorin OS 18.1 vs Linux Mint 22.3: The Ultimate 2026 Windows Replacement!” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9khQA-UCAI , I decided to test/try them out on my PCs.
Since I could boot Linux on a flash drive to try it out without disturbing the [Windows 10] operating system on the PC’s hard drive, I created bootable flash drives for Zorin and Mint using balenaEtcher which burns a bootable .iso image on the flash drive.
I tried both on my Windows 10 PC, spending a short time examining them. Since I needed to return to Windows for my current daily tasks, I rebooted to Windows on the PC.
The next day is when all the fun? (challenges) came. I had an older 2013 vintage PC which had Windows crash back in 2018. In 2020 I had installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on it our personal cloud server. But shortly after installing Tumbleweed, because of needs on another PC, I needed to reclaim the external disk that I was going to use as the cloud. So for 6 years the PC with Tumbleweed just sat there.
The flash drive would not boot on the Tumbleweed PC. Since it has been years since I was using Linux or Unix, I relied on grok for diagnosis and suggestions. Actually about a full day and a half of back and forth try-this/heres-the-results conversations.
There were a multitude of problems as to why it would not boot the Linux Mint flash drive.
Tumbleweed had modified the boot menu using grub so it only booted versions of Tumbleweed, and the timeout viewing of the boot menu was set to zero seconds. After modifying the grup.cfg file, It still wouldn’t boot to a USB drive.
Turns out that the balenaEtcher app only creates flash drives that work in newer PCs. Since the Tumbleweed PC was 2013 vintage, we tried creating the flash with Rufus, which creates flash drives that work with older PCs.
It still would not boot, so we copied the .iso file from the flash to the Tumbleweed’s hard drive. We were then able to boot the .iso from there to try/test Mint, but the PC was still an old OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation.
This all took about 10 hours, the first day conversing with grok. Some of the difficulties were that grok said “type these 6 different commands and tell me what the result is”. I was conversing with grok via my Android phone, and I didn’t want to be manually typing all the results that I saw on the Tumbleweed PC screen into my phone, and Tumbleweed was not network connected to my other systems, so I finally copy/pasted the results to a file on a flash drive and transferred it to my Windows PC and continued conversing with grok on X via a browser.
The next day I decided I wanted to get rid of the cursed 6-year old Tumbleweed and install Mint on the PC. The previous day, we learned to I could hold down the shift key when rebooting the 2013 Dell PC to keep it from immediately booting Tumbleweed. And for a few seconds I would see “F10 Boot Options” in the upper right corner of the screen. But hitting F10 didn’t do anything. Grok suggested using Fn+F10 instead, and I finally saw a blue Boot Manager menu appear.
Using the Rufus generated Flash drive, I was able to completely install Mint on the PC.
After a day of rest, I decided to attempt try/testing Linux Zorin on another vintage Dell PC. This time, because it did not have Tumbleweed installed, I avoided 75% of the problems I previously had. Plus using a Rufus created flash drive, It immediately booted the flash drive containing Zorin.
The only problem with this PC was that once I was running Zorin, I was getting message that one of it’s hard drives is likely to fail soon. It has a 1 tb WDC drive and a 1 tb Hitachi drive (which says it will fail soon indicating a temperature of 28deg C / 82deg F.
Next step, open the box, vaccuum out the dust buildup, remove the Hitachi drive, and try to do an install.