You don’t have to install anything on your laptop if you just want to try Linux and see if it would work for you. You can just prepare a Linux Mint USB (or any other distribution really) plug it to your laptop and boot from it. This will boot into the live desktop from the USB and will not touch your drives. There you can try Linux and get a feel for it before you commit.

Well you can’t really use something not useful to you. Yes Linux is very nice but at the end of the day you gotta use the thing that gets the job done.