Pop!_OS from System76 is a superb choice for your laptop, so long as it has a 64-bit processor and more than 2GB of RAM. You’ll find Pop on the DVD, but that’s probably not immediately of much use to you as laptops (and indeed desktops) don’t tend to bother with optical drives nowadays. If you have a machine with an optical drive, then you can write the ISO file in the /pop/ directory on the DVD to a USB stick using Etcher (see the instructions on our DVD pages). And if you don’t you can download said file from the Pop website at https://system76.com/pop.
DUAL-BOOTING WITH POP!_OS
“The Pop installer will resize your Windows partition and give you a handy boot menu and in all likelihood it’ll work just fine.”
We’ve gone with the LTS edition here (based on Ubuntu 20.04) primarily because we want you to feel at home with your new OS. October’s 20.10 release is only supported for nine months, whereas the LTS release is supported (at least in terms of Ubuntu support) until 2025. In addition, there’s all the extra testing that goes into the LTS, together with our glowing report of its stability, that should give you some reassurance that you won’t get bitten by bugs. We’ve prepared a short summary over the page of what’s new in Pop 20.10 and by all means try it out if you want to explore the latest and greatest version.