>>1551748So in short:
1) Look into hard drive backup solutions. Clonezilla
https://clonezilla.org/2) Obtain external hard drive. Backup your existing Win installation to external hard drive as a fail safe restore point. Do a FULL HARD DRIVE BACKUP not incremental backup at first...
3) Decide which OS you want to use as your main daily driver going forward. Linux or Windows. From there you can either nuke your hard drive and install Linux fully and completely and then install Oracle Virtualbox
https://www.virtualbox.org/ and get decide which virtual machine version of Windows you want as guest OS's. You can run Win 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 or all of the above if you have enough space and RAM.
Or you can keep Windows as is, and install Virtualbox within Windows to run a test virtual machine of Linux of whatever distros/flavors you wish to test out. This is cool because you can run Mint and Ubuntu or anything else you like to see what fits for you.
You suddenly have massive flexibility. The keys are just to have an external drive to make backups so you can revert at any moment. It takes minutes versus days setting things up the long way...program by program...