“identity politics” can mean a few different things. But overall, these are not separate things under capitalism. Capitalism creates, for example, racial categories by which to designate a particular subclass of human in a given society, one that can be hyperexploited, mistreated, and scapegoated for problems, driving a false consciousness. And that racial oppression is a real, existing thing that takes on its own life and forms, stoked or suppressed as needed for the liberal order. Saying, “stop talking about racial oppression so much” ignores an extremely important material reality of capitalist society, really an essential aspect, and the point of doing a class analysis is to explain how we can come together for mutual liberation from these oppressions. For example, the liberation of women was essential to most socialist revolutions, the oppression of women also being intrinsically tied to capitalist oppression, typically to make them marginalized unpaid workers whose role is the reproduction of labor, the creation and maintenance of the reserve army of labor and the other workers, generally designated male. This also made women more precarious overall and paid worse than men for the same job, fulfilling a similar role for hyperexpoitation as race.
A leftist who says, “it’s about class not identity” is not well-versed in basic Marxist analysis or history. They are forwarding a wrong and counterrevolutionary line. They should always say, “yes and” to describe both class antagonism and marginalizationa related to identity politics as both emerging from capitalism. Class conflict isn’t even always the primary contradiction in a nation, such as in Palestine where it is settler colonialism (and internationally, imperialism). One should always be able to recognize the real existence of marginalization and its function in the service of capital, spreading a coherent, united approach towards contradictions.
Now, there is a common and liberal form of identity politics that is mostly just a self-serving form of tokenization. Like the 3rd generation gusano that says, “how dare you tell me Castro did good things, he took my family’s slave plantation farm!” These are cynical weapons that are themselves inherently racist, sexist, transphobic, etc etc by flattening a ethnic group, gender, etc into just one experience that somehow, through the magic of liberalism, ends up justifying fascism, genocide, war, imperialism… We do have to push back against this.
You download a file (usually an iso image) and use a tool to write that to a USB stick. Then you out the USB stick in your computer, restart it, and ten usually do some special key combinations right when it first starts (and says “Lenovo” in this case) to use a boot menu to boot from that USB stick. For a user friendly Linux distribution you can then usually use all of the default settings and be fine, but feel free to ask about them here as well.
For your follow-up question about which to use, I recommend something that is well-supported (read: popular) and does not require a terminal to update and configure. Desktop Linux distributions. This includes:
I have intentionally left some out because of their software choices / track record and listed them in the order I would recommend them.
Debian is solid and has a very good software team and community focus. It is the base of many other Linux distributions. It might require a couple uses of the terminal early on but then won’t after that.
Fedora is a comparably bleeding edge desktop distribution associated with Red Hat. It is usually technically pretty sound but the Red Hat side is bazinga idiots who, for example, recently tried to support LLM use in the project. Red Hat is also a US military contractor.
OpenSUSE is pretty cool and is basically Euro Debian. Less mature for desktop and it’s supporting company is more focused on building out enterprise tooling. Still good though.
Mint is Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, with snaps (an annoying software distribution system) stripped out and some questionable software maintenance deciso, usually around their deep desire to make all of their user interfaces green.