Oh yeah, I don’t think he’s going to be doing that either. I think this is plain old uninstalling pre-installed HP stuff and hoping for the best kind of situation.

Mint is definitely at LEAST as easy to install as Windows, if not easier. As long as all the stuff on his laptop is supported out of the box. I love my Mint install, but last month I spent 40 minutes on github trying to find the right release of the open driver to work with my revision of network adapter, and the amount of work in the terminal was undoubtedly more than somebody asking this question would be comfortable with.