Fellow Linux enthusiasts, I was thinking of reviving my old laptop so my dad could use it to join court hearings via video if needed. The laptop is a Lenovo B50-30 (Celeron N2830, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB SSD). ChatGPT recommends installing Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" Xfce 64-bit with the following SSD partitioning scheme:

EFI 512 MB

/ \~220 GB ext4

swap 8 GB

Is this good advice to follow?

I never used Linux and it would be my first experience with it.

Looks like a generic but reasonable recommendation. But mist installers would set this up without your need of weighing in.

Sounds reasonable. It's not like you only get one shot at it, you can always install something else if you don't like it.

At first glance, looks fine. Mint is pretty easy to install and is user friendly. Give it a go. Worst case just try again.

Give it a shot. The installer should pick a good one for you. Celeron chips aren't the best but you probably know that. I am sure it will work. Is there a reason GPT recommended a specific partition scheme instead of the default?

This why:
If this is going to be the only OS and you don't plan on regularly reinstalling Linux, then for an old laptop, I would personally choose:
EFI 512 MB
/ ~220 GB ext4
swap 8 GB
In other words, no separate /home partition.
It’s simpler, there’s less chance of making a mistake during installation, and you avoid the situation where the / partition suddenly fills up while there are still tens of gigabytes of free space on /home.
For your specific scenario, I would go with just one large / partition plus swap.

Go for it if you know what you're doing. If not, just let the installer do its job.

Just let the installer set up
It's own

It will automatically set everything it needs by itself when you install it

I would do 4gb swap 8 might cause some lag but yeah

Honestly, for tech stuff, I prefer to use claude's Sonnet model.

Internet browsing and watching videos, no tech or coding, it's mostly so my parents could use it. I installed lightweight windows 10 on it, but it struggles to open even starting page of Google chrome

Okay. Sonnet still gives better recommendations for things like this. 50GB on your root should be more than sufficient, but keeping it all on the same partition works too. "