minni Re: Encryption - i just checked my Dell laptop, and it states "C: BitLocker off" - so i guess that means Linux can run alongside Win-11 on there? (if the latter can ever get successfully graduated to Win-11)
Yes, it should be possible to run alongside without having to reinstall Windows. If you do decide to give it a try, the installer for a system like Mint or Ubuntu (which is always what I'd suggest for a newcomer) will tell you if it can resize the Windows installation before it ever makes any changes to the system, giving you the chance to nope out if it can't do it. There's always a risk it might break the installation anyway, but the risk is pretty small: windows filesystem resizing is something that Linux has been able to do for a very long time, as dual booting alongside Windows is something Linux users have wanted to be able to do since the very beginning - almost all Linux users dual booted at some point and many still do.
If you're going to give it a go, I suggest doing so before you install Windows 11 though: Windows 11 lists a TPM2 in the requirements because bitlocker is turned on by default. There's a very good chance that simply upgrading will turn it on and make it impossible to resize the windows installation.
minni The truth is, either option is daunting. For example, i'd forgotten to mention that I have a whole bunch of RTF (WordPad) files, which i'm unsure if they're readily compatible with Linux.
RTF is an open standard: its whole point was that it could be read on any system. It's fully supported in every word processor you can find for Linux (LibreOffice is probably the best choice. You can find that for Windows, too. It's free/open source). 🙂 Though you probably won't find the exact same fonts -- Linux will have similar fonts within the same class, but fonts like Calibri are unique to Microsoft, and Arial requires a licensing fee so you won't find it (legally) in Linux. Most modern Linux distributions ship with the Liberation font set out of the box, at a minimum, with more options available in their repositories/app stores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts (see also the Nimbus font set. You can also install the Google open fonts, which are a large library of free fonts). It's also fairly easy to install fonts you find on other sites - most desktop environments will install them automatically if you double click on the file.
minni ...also, there's the matter that with Windows, i finally painstakingly wrote out the extensive yet reliable method to Manually install my vintage HP laserjet 1018 printer in Win-10, after various other instructions proved unsuccessful. It involves clicking hp-laserjet-1018-basic-driver.zip (in "Lenovo/downloads"), extracting basic-driver, copying the path, and alot more.
Good news on that front: the driver for that printer is part of the ghostscript printer libraries on Linux. They're installed by default on most Linux distributions, or as a dependency for cups, which is the Linux printer subsystem (cups = common unix printing system). Ubuntu's actually the outlier - you would need to install ghostscript-printer-app from the app store to get the driver. https://www.openprinting.org/driver/foo2zjs-z1
The printer app in a desktop like Gnome or KDE should automatically detect it and install it with a single click. I don't have a printer in that family to test with, but I can say that my Brother HL-2170W (another ancient laser printer) "just worked" without me needing to install anything.
minni For that matter, would the disablement of WiFi pose issues in Linux?
No issues at all. You can turn it off in the network app - it should remember your preferred state at bootup, or you can simply disable wifi and bluetooth in the computer BIOS entirely if your computer supports it. It's been about 20 years since the last time I saw an Ethernet adapter that wasn't supported in Linux - even newer USB adapters "just work".
On that note, most of your computer should "just work" without you needing to find drivers. Booting into a graphical installer for something like Ubuntu will allow you to test that and be sure though. Dell sells Ubuntu as an option on most of their computer lineup these days, so it would definitely be the first system to try. If your laptop is a gaming laptop with an NVidia graphics card you might need to install additional software to get full performance out of it, but that's about the only driver you're even remotely likely to have to find on a Dell laptop.