Mint is up and running!
Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven't played anything yet but I'm sure I'll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn't get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it's doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
Again: Hallelujah, another soul saved!
So now it's basically down to this: Keep using it for whatever you would normally do in windows. And if you're having issues, try to sort it out.
And then one day you'll suddenly realize how long it's been without Windows, and that you don't really see a reason for going back any time soon.
I went for it, kept what I wanted on an external hard drive and nuked the rest. No ragrets
Welcome to freedom and perfect mental health.
The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work. Just look for the software you want, install, have at it.
I'm sorry, it just brings me so much joy when I read stories like this one.