Bitcoin is basically only mined via ASICs now. You can still mine something like ETC but honestly chains have (rightfully) been moving to far more efficient consensus using Proof of Stake.
For the amount of electricity you would need to mine a meaningful amount of BTC, you'd be much better off buying spending $50 or $100 worth of BTC or ETH every week. Either hodl or DCA sell when prices bounce up.
I will miss her so much!
Yeah I've felt that way for a long time. It's done all that I need and more since about 2003.
Yes you'll fuck things up. Don't keep anything remotely important on it and screw around with it. That's how you learn. Blow your install away intentionally, try a different distribution the next time. There's a lot more variability between distros, and more customizability compared to Windows too.
If you want to learn something new and different anyway. It's definitely not like Windows except at the most surface level; you can get by in the GUI for almost everything until something goes wrong, but that's exactly when you want to have been learning cmdline stuff, so you can try to salvage it.
chattr +i
;)
This is a bit of a hack, but while you wait for a new drive or laptop, you could install Linux onto a thumb drive and run it from there.
When you use Rufus to write the image to the flash drive, it should give you the option to create a persistent storage section with a slider to say how much of the drive to allocate to that. At least this should keep Microsoft from destroying the data on it, lthough it will probably ask every time it starts up whether you want to format that drive.
This way you can just use whatever your BIOS boot key is, probably something like F12, to boot onto your Linux and keep it away from Microsoft :)