Yes you can. However, if you are not familiar with systems administration then you will experience much more difficulty than just using the USB method.

Whatever you do, backup all of your important files and data from Windows before you attempt anything. To be extra safe create a Windows recovery USB.

After you have backed up important things then just read as much as you can regarding your OS of choice, like MX, and then try it. Having a second source of internet for any problems that may arise is recommended, like a smartphone.

And then try it. My first foray into Linux dealt me about a week of struggles before I got ot working. That was 20 years ago and thing have gotten better since then.

You will struggle at first. You may even fail a few times, but the feeling of accomplishment and the freedom of having an OS that allows you to do what you want and not what a corporation deems profitable is priceless. You will enjoy that feeling.

Strictly speaking yes, but only if you have more than one hard drive. You'd need some technical expertise, because it's not a normal thing to do.

In reality, you would be better off buying the cheapest USB storage you can find (which should be cheaper than the cost to post it to you, these days) and turning that into an installer

What is the reason you want to do it specifically this way?

I think if you want a very easy solution, then this might actually be the answer you are looking for:

Get an USB stick. Then download the program called Unetbootin . Open the program. It has a list of all Linux distributions out there. I'd say choose Linux Mint. I'm using OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, and am very happy with it as well.

Then in the bottom of the Unetbootin screen, choose your USB stick and press the install button. After that reboot your computer from that USB stick and things will be rolling just fine! :)

You'll be creating the USB stick with almost zero effort. It works and it's easy.

PXE / Net boot / install is a thing but that's not really meant for Linux noobs. Often times it's something IT departments do to install the same OS image on multiple systems on the same network (not just Linux, Windows and others can do this too). I've never attempted to do that over the internet so can't say much else about that process.

Being this is linux4noobs I suspect you're just talking about one system being installed, a regular USB install would be far more feasible in your use case. You're kind of going straight into hard mode attempting more advanced types of installs.

It depends.

https://linuxvox.com/blog/reinstall-ubuntu-from-terminal/

:3

1st step:

Install gentoo (stage3).

2nd step:

Hijack with bedrock.

3rd step:

Fetch any debian or devuan.

4th step:

Change repos & add things

Ta-da!

;D

Now your MX Linux, installed "directly" online, also has gentoo and bedrocklinux capabilities too. ;)

More "sane"(?) methods may exist, but just for breadth-of-possibilities and whimsy, I offered this alternative route. ;)

Back on the day, I was able to coerce the Windows bootloader into chainloading GRUB, which then launched a netboot kernel and initrd for Ubuntu that contained the CLI installer. I don't know if that's still possible, but I only needed one hard drive for it and it worked great until the laptop sadly melted itself to death several years later (it had a desktop P4 in a 14-inch laptop chassis, so I was surprised it took that long to die).

Its not something I would want to do because if something goes wrong I want the physical media to boot off of regardless of its a cd or usb device.

Do you want to run specific apps, or see what the desktop UI looks like?