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[OCLUG-Tech] reconfigure laptop disk for linux?

Background (skip to QUERY if you wish):

While in Florida recently, my wife and I spotted a nice 11.6" Dell Inspiron
for $300 US. The design is "old", with 500GB spinning disk, 4 GB Ram, quad
core processor that isn't terribly powerful. However, it is a size Mary likes
for travel, and enough disk for lots of family photos and videos. (Her previous
Asus EEE 1225B was similar, but heavier, and suffered an unfortunate collision
with a tile floor that has made it only partly functional.) We've tried Android
tablet, but the key layout on Android -- and we've looked around at several --
makes doing email and stuff awkward. And they don't store much.

It has Windows 10 and works reasonably well with this. We'd like to keep
the Win10 in dual boot. Sometimes useful to test things.

For safety, using the Windows 10 recovery disk tool
  (Control Panel / System & Security > Security & Maintenance > Recovery)
created a recovery USB on a 16 GB Lexar flash key.

Also downloaded Clonezilla clonezilla-live-20170905-zesty-amd64.iso and used mintstick tool
to install on a USB key (only uses about 275 MB). This is in the alternate
repository for Clonezilla and allows UEFI booting. The regular "stable" choice did not
boot.

Made a whole disk image using this and put it on an external USB drive from the Dell.


QUERY:

The partition structure is as follows:

Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 3BBC8E19-46F4-4AB6-B9DA-7B3B4AB0A0DF

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048   1026047   1024000   500M EFI System
/dev/sda2    1026048   1288191    262144   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda3    1288192 975849471 974561280 464.7G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda4  975849472 976771071    921600   450M Windows recovery environment

Unless I'm really mis-reading this, I've got 4 primary partitions, so need to
convert one to Extended/Logical. Some forum comments say this can be risky.
Does anyone have recommendations or experience?

- Some net comments suggest using Windows tool to do this. It appears that the
  MiniTool Partition Wizard (https://www.partitionwizard.com) can do this.

- In linux there appears to be fixparts from
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/files/gptfdisk/1.0.1/fixparts-binaries/

Other choices?

My current plan is

- to convert the 465G particion with the free version of Partition Wizard
- test Win10 boots
- use partimg from liveUSB to image that converted partition
- shrink the Win10 partition
- test booting again
- use partimg again to save (replace previous save)
- install Linux (Mint 18.3 Sylvia is what Mary is used to) to the freed-up space.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Best, JN