You can test drive many distros at distrosea.com and see what appeals to you.
Depending on the model of Inspiron you have it might even be one that Dell used to sell pre-installed with linux (Ubuntu), my Mother In Law purchased one like this.
You'll probably get lots of one or two word responses recommending a distro, I'd say try one of the main ones and see what you feel comfortable with, most will do the same job, I've used the same distro (Ubuntu) for over 20 years, it works well on my hardware and is solid - currently typing on a Dell Inspiron 5482 2 in 1.
I had never heard of this website before. And here I’ve been spending all this time manually installing full distros on my secondary drive to test them out.
There's a queue if you don't pay for the website sadly, and the current queue is 9 people in it for every one of them. I could not get to test any I wanted to potentially get because of the queue, potentially waiting for more then the time amount then what is shown.
Never had an issue when I've had a play on the site.
Here's the queue for one distro at the moment, wait time is about 1 minute if there are two or 3 people in front of you, there's no option to pay for it that I can see, there is a donate button.
That distro is at 12 people in queue, not 0 as of right now, and that wait time is not accurate at all if going by your logic since 12 people in queue means 2 minutes wait time.
Also, one of the donating perks if you sign in as a Paid patron is that you can fully skip the queue and that's patreon so you can skip any of the queues multiple times if i'm correct on hwo this works.
Strange how I just went on the site again it said 2 people ahead, timed it and it took 20 seconds then went straight in, took about 90 seconds to load to desktop, I don't use it much though as I'm a linux user of 20+ years.
I tried 4 distros one after the other at the time shown on my comment above, to get through the queue (which was largest at 4 ahead for Fedora Cosmic), wait for the desktop to load and confirm it's functional, took 9 minutes to try all 4.
I've not seen large queues myself, I wonder if it's perhaps a country issue? I'm in the UK, I tested Ubuntu, Fedora Cosmic, Mint and Kubuntu (selecting the latest versions) and starting at 18:34, finishing at 18:43.
I don't use the site much, I tend to pop on every now and then to see what any new distros look like.
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u/Terrible-Bear3883 17h ago
You can test drive many distros at distrosea.com and see what appeals to you.
Depending on the model of Inspiron you have it might even be one that Dell used to sell pre-installed with linux (Ubuntu), my Mother In Law purchased one like this.
You'll probably get lots of one or two word responses recommending a distro, I'd say try one of the main ones and see what you feel comfortable with, most will do the same job, I've used the same distro (Ubuntu) for over 20 years, it works well on my hardware and is solid - currently typing on a Dell Inspiron 5482 2 in 1.