About the upcoming discontinuation of windows 10 support...

[Bumhug]

I'm sure there's some way to still do it, but I bet it would require some weird technical stuff like changing the location of your Linux boot partition, or something similarly exotic.

you forgot to mention blood sacrifices and a ritual Linux dance. /j

but if seriously, thanks for the advice! i've tried Linux Mint live preview once, and kinda liked it. also i know if i'd go into full paranoid (either in medical sense or not) mode, i could use Tails then

TBH, I think you should play with Tails. It's super useful when there are cases where you don't trust the OS on the hardware you're using and don't have access to your own stuff. When I am at hotels with business centers/computers, I boot into Tails to make sure there are no traces of what I did on that computer. Being able to read the data off the Windows volume is just a bonus. I have it on a teensie USB drive that I keep on my keychain.

I guess it's also a fun trick to show off at parties