@Thebratdragon@mastodon.scot @PurpleJillybeans@kind.social Here's my short guide. Or rather, telling you which parts of the official guide to installing Linux Mint you need to look at.

1)Download the operation system. This is an .iso file. It's pretty large, but you can download it just like you'd download any other file.

2)Create a "bootable USB."
This requires you to have an external USB thumb drive. If you're on Windows, you have to download another free program called Etcher, which will walk you through the process.

3)Power off your computer, plug in the thumb drive, and boot. This is often the hardest step, and it depends more on your computer manufacturer than the version of Linux you are trying to install. Read the instructions and don't hesitate to come back here and ask questions if you run into issues!

After that, click "Install Linux Mint." the installer will walk you through everything. You can just keep accepting the default options and you should get a working system.

If your hardware is a few years old, it will likely work perfectly. If your hardware is new, it's possible your system will be missing some drivers, but Mint should be able to detect, download, and install those automatically.

4) There is, however, one moderately rare way this can go wrong (and it happened to me my first time): if the missing driver is for your wifi card, and you don't have an Ethernet cable, then Mint won't be able to connect to the internet to download the missing driver.

When this happened to me (8 years ago now), I felt frustrated: I needed to connect to the internet to download a driver to allow me to connect to the internet! At this point I went to the Mint forum, and a helpful user patiently explained what I needed to do.