Wild Penquin

Dont do it on your main system. Do it on a system that you dont mind being able to wipe at any time if you are just learning linux 🙂

That's not how any of this works, if you virtualize windows 7 your virtual machine will have any and all vulnerabilities that come with it. The host system has no way to prevent it. The only advantage in terms of security is that if your VM is infected the rest of your system should still be OK and you should be able to restore the VM from a snapshot; that doesn't really depend on what host distro you use.

Update so far.
 
I called a few data recovery places. I have just enough experience to think I know what would have to be done to fix my issues. The dollar amount I was being quoted to get my data back was offensive.
 
I sat down and thought through the problem for a couple hours and came up with a few things.
 
Testdisk creates images of partitions. And I have A TON of experience with Tesdisk and PhotoRec. Due to all those pictures of my kids originally being mixed on different drives over the years. Some of which weren't treated with the respect they deserved considering the data they held.
 
My Data was mostly on an exFAT partition because that at the time of breaking up my new external seemed like the likeliest option that linux, Mac, and Windows would all be able to read and use.
 
I also have an APFS partition for TimeMachine backups
 
And a Mac OS Extended Journaled partition for Macs own storage.
 
Mac knew nothing about me deleting the partitions and expected those drives to still be there. That got the gears turning. I plugged the drive in and there we are. Access.
 
I immediately chopped up the new drive the same way the old was. I first made a TimeMachine backup and copied the data from the other partitions over to the new partitions.
 
Then I made an images of what I could.
 
I have my data safe and the old drive sitting as it was for experimentation. As time permits I want to follow some steps outlined by you beautiful helpful people and give some feedback. I hope for all of us to learn from this situation

Testdisk can try to recover a partition table, but it'll write to the drive when doing so with the potential for making things worse, so you should make a full image of the drive onto other storage first and only work on that if you really want to attempt something yourself. 
 
And for next time remember that any storage device can fail at any time so having only one copy of important things is a no-no, make backups.

Absolutely contact specialists for important data recovery.
 
From your description of events it's possible nothing bad actually happened; if you didn't give the partition editor the go-ahead by confirming your new partition scheme it shouldn't have actually touched the drive. Yanking the drive out is a bad idea but if nothing was being written it may not have done any damage. Still, it's not worth risking actual data loss so I'd still contact a specialist rather than trying to plug it into anything.
 
Another cause for hope is that even if you actually deleted the partitions the files should still be there in an inaccessible state; in that case recovery should be perfectly possible for a specialist (again don't try anything yourself).
 
In the future I would advise you to never entrust important data to a single storage device, particularly an external consumer drive. Partitioning mistakes aside these devices are liable to fail spontanously, sometimes unrecoverably, and lose your data.

I really hope you didn't corrupt anything by yanking that out. 
Now, the only advice. If it is really important data, go to data recovery experts. Don't plug it back in, send it straight to specialists.
Linus had a really impossible situation on his hand with his server, but werecoverdata.com helped him out of it, and it is a really good company. So I would start there.
 
If your first reaction to deleting a partition is to also potentially corrupt and completely destroy the data, I wouldn't trust you to do any recovery without potentially making it worse, no offence. So please use the experts, especially because you are already willing to pay to get the data back.
 
You wouldn't perform brain surgery on yourself, you would go to a doctor, the same goes for data recovery, so don't worry about "putting this drive in another persons hands", because their hands are far more trained than yours.
 
Just to reiterate, WeRecoverData has recovered data for the biggest companies on earth, they have recovered utterly unrecoverable data off burned down hdds by basically using magic, so recovering your data would be just a tuesday for them, so no need to worry at all, they will get your data for you.

Can't be an X issue since on Manjaro with an AMD GPU the system will default to Wayland for both Gnome & KDE.
 
To be 100% sure you'd need to check the kernel logs from boot and see what the AMDGPU kernel modules reports.
 
sudo dmesg --human --kernel  --reltime
 
will get you a full kernel log in a nice readable format, hold page down till the bottom then go back up until you find the current boot and look for modules called AMDGPU.
 
You can also do
 
sudo journalctl -k -b0
 
to get the kernel logs for the current boot but its very hard to read since its just white text dumped onto a page.
 
Copy/paste them here please

This ^ is superfluous. grep can read the file so there is no need to pipe from cat.
Do:
grep [pattern] [file]
(no worries everyone makes this mistake, even me sometimes)
 
I actually like a lot of old Unix stuff but the syntax for find I do not.
This is just silly but necessary sometimes.
find ./ -iname "file.txt" -print 2>/dev/null we can do better than that.. make a simpler syntax? You can't change find because it would break everything but a new command might be good here.. efind anyone..?

Most Game Publishers targeting linux are Targeting Steam's containerized Runtime and other open-source projects have started shipping in Containerized FlatPaks.
Lutris, the most common Manager for Windows Executable, also ships it's own Runtime.
 
We are pretty much reaching a point to where the underlying distro really doesn't matter outside of Development, and even that is changing. Even with that said, there has been a rather recent shift to upstream Distro's like Arch for Developers.

Most of that work only matters if you use AMD Graphics. There are also community members that backport the Kernel and Mesa Builds to more downstream distros.
Everything else in Valves Steam Proton Build is containerized which should make versioning not matter. The exception for Proton is Native Builds like Proton-TKG, which primarily target Arch and often tend to have minimal improvements at this point, sometimes introducing new issues.

Most (all?) Linux distributions can resize NTFS partitions. This means your data will not be gone, even if installing on the same disk (contrary to what some people claim in this thread).
 
However, do make backups of all the important data on your Windows drive before installation. Any partition resize operation is dangerous in principle (for example, a power outage at the wrong time -> the file system being operated on will be corrupted, possibly beyond repair). Installing alongside a Windows can be confusing for someone not accustomed to partitioning - and, frankly, I've seem some quite confusing user interface choices in some distribution installers especially in the partitioning phase. So one could erase their windows partition during installation by mistake (although strictly not necessary and despite the installer offering another choice).

Didn't notice OP hasn't build their system yet. I'd indeed take an AMD GPU over an NVidia one given the choice, however NVidia drivers are not necessarily bad either. They will more likely interfere with stuff like hibernation, so with a Laptop, it is double as important to try to steer towards an AMD GPU. Things used to be vice-versa (going back in time to the fglrx times), but things have changed! But NVidia drivers are still usable.
 
Also, this may seem nit-picky:
but that statement is untrue (emphasis mine). Both AMD and Nvidia are "built into the OS" exactly on the same level. The difference is that the NVidia drivers are closed source and the AMD drivers are open source (the desktop-oriented version; there's also the CUDA/enterprise/computing oriented version which is partly closed source). In practice, this means two things: first, the users are at the mercy of NVidia on how they develop their drivers and on what they prioritize, and their co-operation with the Linux Kernel hasn't been that good AFAIK.... the AMD drivers clearly seem to have a better development model and they've benefited from the fact their driver is Open sourced.
 
Get a deal-breaker bug with NVidia? Though luck - you can try to post on their forum and **hope**!
 
Got a deal-breaker bug with AMD? Provided you know how to make a proper bug report, you can make one on your distribution or upstream bugzilla and it will gain attention unless the bug is really, really rare and obscure! If it is a common one, someone else will report the bug!
 
EDIT: Got some other bug in the Kernel, and using NVidia? The first thing they will tell you is to disable the OOT NVidia drivers since it "taints" the Kernel and then reproduce the bug! 
 
The second thing from users point of view is that the NVidia driver needs to be downloaded / enabled separately (on most, but not all distributions), but the core reason is in the licensing. From software point of view, it is a driver (or several components of the chain) exactly similarly as the AMD driver is.

As others have said, depends on whether you format the drive/partition that has your data on it. You also have the option to install Linux alongside Windows (aka dual boot) and then access data that is on the Windows partition from Linux. If you're new and inexperienced, it is probably a very good idea to create a backup before installing anything. Just to make sure you don't lose your data.
 
Whether you can still use your stuff depends on what exactly you mean by "stuff". If you mean data (images, documents, etc.) you will be able to read (almost all of) it and edit most of it. If you mean programs, no, Windows programs generally don't run on Linux. You can get (some of) them to run through a compatibility layer called "Wine", but this won't work for all of them and with varying success.

That completely depends on how you set it up. Is this HDD separate from your boot drive or the same drive? If it's the boot drive, then wiping Windows to install Linux will wipe all of the files on the Windows partition. If it's a separate drive, Linux won't touch it unless you tell it to, and Linux can read NTFS partitions these days, so you can still access your data.

I think you mean objective, since "best" is highly subjective. I'd say the question is pure flamebait.

You didn't tell why you want / need to change to Linux - and as such @Dat Guyposed an important question! For your priorities it seems like the best option is to stick with Windows. However, that doesn't mean you don't have a reason you didn't tell us (it's your choice after all, you don't need to tell us =) ). If your mind is set, be aware there might be things you will need to give up.
 
Any distro will do, but as you are new to Linux distributions, choose a mainstream one, like some flavor of Ubuntu. As long as you don't choose a server or stability oriented distribution (which means, lagging behind in gaming, multimedia and desktop-oriented updates in favor of server-grade stability), your gaming experience will be as good as it gets. Indeed anti-cheat will cause problems along with some other incompatibilities with windows games. Sometimes you still need to choose to play games which work on Linux, and have a good reason to use Linux - if you can not change the games you play, stick to Windows.
 
PopOS! is often recommended here, and as such I suppose it is good (I haven't tried it myself). I'm not sure why PopOS is considered the easiest - from a quick glance it seems the only thing separating it from other desktop-oriented is that it enables proprietary NVidia drivers per default (which is almost mandatory for gaming). But installing the proprietary drivers is a matter of a few mouse clicks via the GUI in most mainstream distributions, and with an AMD gpu this is not an issue (the drivers - for gaming/desktop users - are already in the Kernel).
 
For general desktop experience, the most important thing is the choice of DE (not the distribution per se!). Many distributions use Gnome, which I really dislike (it is too basic and dumbed-down, if you will, for my taste), but the choice of DE really boils down to user preference. I encourage to try out several ones! You can install several desktop environments in practically any distribution out there and change the one you use quite easily. I'm really set to using KDE Plasma (more suitable for a power user IMO, more Windows-like than Gnome), but I have tried several DEs over the years. I also like i3 for it's simplicity, but remember you will really need to change your orientation towards the UI as there will be some paradigm shifts if going to some less-mainstream DEs.
 
As for video editing: I don't do any video editing, but last time I checked, video editing applications are much fever in Linux than on Windows. Some proprietary editors do have a Linux version IIRC, while some don't; Sauron claimed your editors don't work in Linux. As a result, there are very few people doing any serious video editing on Linux AFAIK (it's an egg-or-chicken problem - there will be no good editors as long as there are no users). Some FOSS solutions exists but they are often buggy (community driven where development has often stalled) and / or have a sub-optimal user experience because of a badly designed UI. The FOSS solutions might not be up to any professional work (but ok for some every now-and-then, say a few times a year home video editing etc.). Blender is often cited as the best FOSS editor, despite being a 3D computer graphics software suite!
 
In general it absolutely makes sense to check before switching if the applications you absolutely need work in Linux, and if they don't, if you can find an alternative which does. WineAppdb is handy if you want to check wine compatibility, and for games, add protondb to the list. If it seems bad, then you might consider not switching or dual-booting.

With what?

There is barely any difference in this sense between the major distributions.
neither work on Linux

If you are into gaming, there is no advantage in moving away from Windows. Why would you even do that?

Well, why not just try it out and see if it works?
 
Note: The keyword here is not "internal" or "external", but "removable" vs "non-removable". Some BIOSes might not allow booting from all (USB) drives, though.
 
It really depends on the UEFI implementation on the laptop BIOS and how the bootloader was configured on the OS you've installed and what is the default EFI binary on the external drives EFI partition. Typically, internal drives are configured slightly differently than external (removable) ones - however, most bootloaders on a typical Linux distribution will install themself into the default bootlaoder (too) if none exist there yet, and should work if the drive is started to be handled as a removable one.
 
For external (=removable) drivers, it makes no sense to make an UEFI entry in the NVRAM (obviously, since the drive is removable and could be used in any computers, and OTOH there is no guarantee it will be present on the next boot), and this is really the difference to non-removable ones. So the only EFI loader usable on removable drives is the default one (it could be a bootmanager which can start other EFI binaries). If your OS bootloader has installed itself as the default, it should work from an external drive. If it hasn't, then what typically needs to be done is to boot somehow into a Linux distribution and 1) make the NVRAM entries with efibootmgr (or similar) or 2) re-install the whole bootloader. If you do plan to indeed remove the drive, you should install the bootloader as the default EFI partition entry.
 
If you are booting a Windows, you are probably better of using it's tools. I'm not sure if Windowses can be installed on a removable drive easily, but I guess it should be possible.
 
But based on the information you have given it is impossible to give any definite answer for your case specifically. I can't actually make out which OS you are actually trying to boot from the external drive from your post. I.e. is it the original OS (Windows?) your laptop shipped with, some other Linux installation, or the Pop OS installation you are trying to boot?

The short answer is no.
The BlueRay Format is supported in Linux, the protections that companies place on there BluRay Discs is however mostly unsupported.
The same is mostly true for Windows actually, the only main difference is that more effort has been placed on reverse engineering these protections in proprietary Third Party Windows software. A lot of this software gets away with it because it's proprietary and attempts to block users from dumping the data, which also means protecting the software against virtualization or translation layers such as WINE. Linux doesn't have a good open-source solution because it just means that companies would introduce a new protection and it would be a never ending battle, so the result is that development is slow and laggs behind.
 
Because of the limited support and the grey area that surrounds BluRay, most distros don't ship BluRay Support out of the box. If you want the limited functionality Linux has to offer you can check out this Arch Wiiki Entry and adapt it to your Distro, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray
 
Your best option however is to just dump the Movie off the disc, which still often requires manual intervention. MakeMKV with Handbrake is our best solution for this. My recommendation would be to invest in cheap hardware to setup a Jellyfin or Plex instance to store your media on.

Rusting a power supply is never a good idea.

Good comments here, especially one by @LloydLynx. As a rule of thumb, don't worry too much about swap (whether you have it or not). It doesn't make a lot of difference these days for most users. It never hurts to have swap, though. If you often leave idle processes running, you will get more data cached in the RAM by having swap. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but it could be ~the size of RAM used by idle processes on your system, or if you need suspend-to-disk, the size needed for suspending.
 
As for wearing down SSD's: this is really not a problem and hasn't been for a while (a decade?). Only the very few first generation SSD could be worn out in a typical home/office use scenario, but these days even if one would trash away on the disk with constant small writes, it will probably be obsolete because of other reasons before it starts to fail because of too much writes. The cells are more durable and wear leveling is more intelligent than it used to be.

Give this a read. Swap isn't just overflow, the kernel can use it as a sort of cache for better memory management. Like if a block of memory is likely going to be needed, but can't be freed because it's being used by an idle process, it will be sent to swap. If that block of memory ends up needing to be used, it will be safely over written because it's copied to swap. That's just an over simplification.
https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
 
Edit: And to answer your question, 2GB is plenty for your average person using an SSD. Maybe make that 1GB and turn down vm.swappiness if you have an HDD though.

True, but you can also suspend to disk