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.
Seconded. There is a Mate spin as you said you want to stick with that:
https://fedoraproject.org/spins/mate/
Fedora Media Writer makes those
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-user-docs/preparing-boot-media/
Media Writer detects and deals with UEFI, no extra steps required I believe. Just be aware it detects the hardware on the machine its running on to build the right bootable so an image built on a machine without UEFI will not run on a UEFI one. Best to have your friend run Writer themselves if your hardware is different from theirs.
Your friend can install to a usb stick and run off that, preserving Windows in parallel until ready to switch completely if neccessary. If bios/boot is configured to boot from usb when present they can simply insert/remove the stick to switch between the two.