New Dell Inspiron laptop, came with Windows10 pre-installed on a single 1Tb disk, UEFI boot (set to "UEFI boot, secure").
In a word... HATE Win10. Won't uninstall bloatware, keeps doing things I didn't ask it to do, denies me access to files... it's just awful. I'm finally fed up with Microsoft's 600-lb gorilla approach as to exactly who owns MY computer, so I'm officially jumping ship and going to Linux; Windows just ain't worth the hassle anymore. I do have to keep Windows10 on the PC though, so my warranty remains in effect. After that, well, we'll see. If Linux has improved the gaming situation since I last looked at it, Win10 is unceremoniously getting the heave-ho!
Ran Ubuntu Linux some years ago, mostly out of curiosity... 10.x or so, Jaunty Jackalope or something like that. It went right in beside Windows without a problem. Learning curve was too steep, and Windows XP wasn't too bad, so I just forgot about it.
I'm fresh off two attempts to install Linux in a dual-boot setup; Deepin first, then after a botched attempt at that, Ubuntu 17.10... also without success. I don't know if it's relevant: to boot from anything other than the internal drive, have to F12 at the splash screen and change the boot mode from "UEFI boot, secure" to "Legacy," then reboot and F12 again to select the DVD drive as boot source. So that's where things stand when the install begins. Deepin went into the partition I set up for it (in Windows), but I never got the Grub screen on reboot. That kinda unnerved me, so I went more "mainstream" with Ubuntu... and Ubuntu wanted to install alongside Deepin; never even saw Windows at all. Didn't bother to try at that point.
Okay, starting to wonder now. I googled the most popular distro of Linux, and Mint is what came up at the top of the list. I figured there must be a good reason for that, so downloaded 18.3 and burned the ISO to a DVD... and stopped right there.
Couldn't find anything like a tutorial on doing dual-boot installations here, so I started looking around, and figured Installation & Boot was the best place to start. I'm officially nervous now; I can see in this particular piece of the Forums that a lot of people run into issues trying to set up a dual-boot system, and here I am, fresh off of two botched two attempts to do that very same thing, luckily without trashing my existing Windows10 installation... yet. I really don't want to end up like some of those dismayed folks who wound up with a pc that wouldn't boot into either OS, or end up with a Linux-only PC.
So, I guess my question (finally!) is, what do I need to know before I try to install Mint in order to do so successfully? Obviously there's some step(s) critical to getting grub into Window's UEFI boot partition, so the grub menu comes up right at power-on (none of that F12 nonsense), and the OS itself goes into the partition that's waiting for it. Do I need to format the Linux partition to eradicate the existing Deepin install, or delete the partition and re-create it (in Windows) before installing Mint? Or something else altogether?
Any hand-holding and soothing reassurances will be most gratefully received
