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 use the Dell equivalent tiny PCs for my app servers. Debian is nice, general purpose, crazy stable, and pretty easy to work with. It runs my entire stack (well, Debian and OpenWRT).
As far as nuking windows, just delete all the partitions on the disk when you’re at the partitioning stage of whatever distro’s installer. Then just make new partitions as you see fit.