I am trying to change my very old, cheap, and decrepit desktop over from Windows to Linux. I am not tech-savvy and this is taking an inordinate amount of time. Especially as I cannot keep the desktop from loosing internet connection every second.
Weird. Are you on WiFi? Maybe your adapter is not supported.
@jgg I am on WiFi. Still struggling will try to finish before going to sleep tonight.
@bibliolater Also, do read the release notes for the distro you chose, if you haven't already. There may be something that talks about what to do if you have wifi adaptor problems.
When installing a distro in harware you never installed it in before, I recommend to boot it first in live mode, so you can test all the hardware and even "install " the apps you need, without touching your hard disk at all yet. If everything is OK, then you install it for real, with full confidance that everything is OK.
If something doesn't work, I recommend don't even trying to fix it. Try another distro instead, because hardware support is not the same in all distros. And in my experience, when some device doesn't work out of the box, whatever you do to fix it will be a pain in the ass, will break with updates, and some of the 'solutions' you find googling will break your system. Not something for the faint of heart.
I would recommend trying Ubuntu in live mode, since it has a reputation for excellent hardware support. Any other enterprise or enterprise derived distro would be a good choice, since they usually have more resources for hardware testing.
