I really am asking for a friend since I don't use windows and am clueless about it. Also, my own computers are pretty old and don't have UEFI, so I'm clueless about that too.
My friend just bought a new Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3 with Windows 11 Home preinstalled and it immediately sent her into some kind of Microslop enrollment hell, so (yay) she wants to trash Windows altogether and switch to GNU/Linux. I'm trying to help her through it. I do it myself all the time by writing a Debian MATE ISO to a USB stick, booting from USB, and running the Debian installer. But,
- that's already too complicated for a not-really-nerd, and
- that doesn't do anything about UEFI since I haven't had to deal with that. IDK if her new computer has UEFI.
I prefer staying with Debian MATE since I'm used to it and the MATE UI is fairly familiar to Windows users, and GNOME is crap imho. But I'm open to whatever if that simplifies installation.
It would be great if there was a downloadable Windows executable that simply does everything. Install it, click it, it downloads a CD image and either writes it to USB or just manages to boot the image somehow. In days of yore you could do that with SYSLINUX or related stuff. Maybe there is something equivalent now.
Added: I appreciate all the responses but should add that I'm not looking for recommendations of distros unless Debain is for some reason seriously harder to get running, like because of UEFI. Otherwise I'm looking purely for installation advice. Distro choice mostly affects usage post-installation and MATE is what I'm comfortable with so I'd rather have my friend stick with that for now. Unfortunately she's in another state, so I can't go help her with the install in person.
Ah, thanks to you and the other poster about UEFI. I may have confused it with secure boot but if Debian supports that, then great.
Debian uses Gnome by default so I used it for a while and hated it even after getting used to it, so I switched to MATE. KDE looked ok to me though I never explored it much. I might suggest it to her. I'm unfamiliar with Cosmic or Cinnamon. I think I want to start her with MATE, since I use it myself so I'll be familiar with what she's using in case she hit snags. But if she wants to switch to something else afterwards, that's fine with me.
She no longer seems to be able to boot into Windows because of a Microsoft lockout. So I'm going to write a USB drive for her and snail mail it to her.
Someone else mentioned a VIOS setting so I may have to look into that too.
There is a GNU/Linux user group in her town which has a meeting next week, so I suggested that she go to it. Maybe someone there can help her with installation if she hasn't gotten it handled by then.
Right now her only computer is an iphone, so it would be cool if there was a way to write a USB drive from that. Her phone does have a USB-C port but for older iphones, there are also USB drives with a Lightning connector on one end, so you can still write them from the phone.