Can I run Linux on my laptop?

(Almost entirely) Yes.

For technical reasons, there are a few laptops out there that actually can’t run Linux; it’s to do with how their hard drives are configured; it’s to do with RAID, and your eyes are already glazing over. Fair enough.

Your best bet is to use a popular search engine and enter a term along the lines of “[some random laptop] linux”. There will be information about someone out there in the world who has tried Linux on this machine. It’s a big world; you will not be the first to wonder.

The big players these days (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and so on) have all the drivers you can imagine bundled up in their distributions. Generally, you’ll never have to install a driver; that’s a problem of the past — and it was a hell of a problem when it was a problem, back in the day.

A good idea is to try running Linux from a USB stick (or some other medium) and see that everything works. For example, Ubuntu offers instructions for creating a bootable medium and going for a test drive. I won’t reinvent the wheel they invented, but the basics are: download a thing, write that thing to a medium that is bootable, boot from that medium, have fun!

If you’re trying to see whether Linux will run on an old laptop, then you might want to try a minimal “Live Linux”. There are several options, with the most popular teeny tiny Linux being Puppy. (It can be good fun to just hack around with tiny distributions if you want to learn some of the basics and some of the non-mainstream software options.)

Assuming that everything is working from the live distribution, use whatever graphical installer they offer and go for it!

If you want to, you can install Linux along side some other operating system, like Windows. To do so, you’ll need to create partitions — scary! But the installer will help you along, and again, assuming you’re following along with someone who has done this before on your laptop of choice, you’ll have a model to follow. In a case like this, you’ll be creating a “dual boot” system, and the world is full of instructions of how to set this up. (I can’t really help because I’ve never done this because Windows: yuck.)

Long story short: yes you can run Linux on your laptop, with very few exceptions. And these days, installation is as easy as booting from a removeable drive and following basic instructions.

Have a go. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom.