I’ve recently picked up a secondhand Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny PC which ultimately I plan to use as a home server for a variety of functions (media server being the main one) but I don’t need to use it as a main desktop.
It currently has Windows 10 installed. It has a decent sized SSD but no optical drive. I want to install a suitable Linux distro on it. What’s a good Linux distro for my needs? And what’s the best way of doing a scorched earth on the Windows install and replacing it with said distro?
I’m not entirely a Linux noob - I used to work on Xenix and later Red Hat Linux, but that was 30 and 20 years ago respectively!
I have a ThinkCenter m710q Tiny as my server PC and Linux Mint worked out of the box for features of it. It’s pretty basic as far as hardware goes so any modern Linux distro should work fine.
To wipe Windows, you’ll need a bootable USB drive with a Linux iso burned to it. In the installation process you’ll be given either an option to wipe the existing drive or to manually wipe it and format it as a Linux friendly filesystem. Once that’s done you’ll be able to install fresh on the blank drive.