this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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It's probably best to get someone to help you in person. See if you are near a Linux user group since they often supply installation help.
The method I always recommend is buy a new hard drive or SSD and swap it into the place of the old one, so you can swap back if something goes wrong. Then do a clean Linux install onto the new, empty drive.
Don't bother with dual boot, it's complicated and often goes wrong, and anyway you're trying to escape from Windows.
As for installation, you may have to go to your Bios setup to allow booting from USB. Then, on another computer, go here:
https://cdimage.debian.org/images/release/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
Download your favorite iso image. I'll suggest "amd64-mate" if you don't have a preference, since it should be pretty familiar looking to Windows users. Then you want to write a bootable image to a flash drive. I only know how to do that with Linux, but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=write+iso+image+to+flash+drive finds a bunch of pages for other OS's.
Finally, plug the flash drive into your ASUS machine and boot. You should get a bunch of installation prompts and you can generally follow the defaults. It will install a lot of packages one at a time and take around half an hour, so do something else for a while, but also keep an eye on the install process because it will occasionally prompt you for something.
Come back after the installation finishes.
Holy crap, thank you!!!
Just a note, the person just gave you a link for Debian, which is one of the main distributions. However there's many others, as there isn't a single Linux (OS), so you may want to check what you prefer.
Debian-based distributions have the best program support, at least for some of the proprietary stuff. "Download for Linux" in those cases means you get a .deb file which should work fine on these distros.
I personally recommend Linux Mint for most cases.
Oh, and you may have a bit of issue with drivers, especially if it's a newly released laptop. That's the software that makes hardware work properly with the OS. Ubuntu and Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) have graphical driver manager which may come in handy.
So when folks ask especially folks with limited knowledge I mention zorin os https://zorin.com/os/download/ you can just grab the core. The main thing with this os is it uses the long term support kernel of ubuntu which means it tends to be a very stable base and then its aims to give a windows look and feel along with an out of the box experience so many common programs are installed by default like libre office, cd burner, music, video, etc and this includes wine and play on linux so you can right click a windows .exe and install it. Wine is not 100% an for games you want to use proton but its good for being about as easy as can be. One thing to note that if you go to the software app the search eyeglass is in the upper left. It is placed so innocuously that its easy to miss.
Also, if you don't have a machine to just experiment on, swapping an internal SSD drive back and forth may be cumbersome. If you've got the extra 15 Euros, buy a (preferably used) NVMe-to-USB3 adapter/housing, so that you can connect your SSD externally via USB. Such an adapter is very useful anyways. (This setup is still way better than permanently using a regular USB drive.)
Or, while you won't get answer on hardware compatibility, just give it a try in VM under Windows.
Won't cost anything, and can easily be ditched when you want to try something else.