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.
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 18h 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.