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Put Linux Mint on an USB thumbdrive and play with it until you are comfortable. Be wary it would be somewhat slower than a system installed on the laptop's drive.
Then, if it is a spare laptop, go ahead and install it. Avoid dual booting, it is more hassle than worth at this stage in your journey. Disable secureboot before installing, or Windows will try to hijack the laptop. You can always re-enable it later if you really want to, but it's such a bad implementation currently that it doesn't actually provide much security.
Alternatively: if all you want is to use the computer, without having to worry about the technical details of managing an OS. Try something like Bazzite (for gaming) or Aurora (general productivity) instead. They just work and will (practically) never break.
Mint has so many drawbacks these days and so few advantages that I wouldn't recommend it anymore.
Sadly.
How do you mean? I recently installed it and now I'm curious. What other distro would you recommend instead?
Mint is often "slow" in the adoption of things. It has its benefits,as this makes it fairly stable. But it also has its drawbacks - hardware support is a hit or miss, especially with newer hardware (it either works out of the box or you are screwed for years), has still not adopted wayland fully and will likely not be there before Mint23(2026).
That is all fine and dandy if you can live with that. If it works and does what you need it to do you will have very little issues with it. That's what once set Mint apart, it simply worked when others did not and was bloody easy to set up.
Nowadays that's no longer something other distributions don't manage to do. I have recently switched my family and company to fedora(and some Alma/Rhel VMs on my Proxmox cluster) from Windows and tbh: It was as smooth as fuck and as smooth as Mint is, but has a lot of advantages in terms of "up-to-dateness" of a lot of things. (And KDE Plasma is indeed nice)
(We only have two issues that are more KDE based and less Fedora based and that are already being addressed - and only apply to domain networks)
There are other Debian based distributions that are similar as well.
In other words: Mint has, in my eyes, lost it's unique selling point a bit over the last years. Even my most "tech illiterate" employee found herself "at home" in Fedora (as she would have done in Mint), something that was not the case when she trialed Linux 4 years ago.
So in the end: If you are happy with Mint,go with Mint. Be aware of the downsides. If they don't bother you then it's perfect. If it does, well,there are alternatives.
I see now, thank you!
I installed it and it's running. Even plays games well.
Are these drawbacks that anyone would care about if they're not a Linux geek?
If you're a gamer with variable refresh rate monitors that differ, you'll really want Wayland. As others have said Mint is good and easy, but not the most up to date and lacks features compared to Windows. I'm liking Fedora KDE spin for this reason.