The RPi4 also has some useful attached hardware that will help ... You may need the same, or even a USB SD card reader too if your laptop doesn't have one built-in. If you can't get someone else's OS ...

We list the best USB bootable distros, to make it simple and easy to run Linux using nothing more than a USB drive. There are several uses for shoving Linux distros inside a USB flash drive.

Download the latest archive from the Releases repository. Create an SD card or a USB drive, with at least one partition (it can be a regular partition or an ESP) and format it to FAT16 or FAT32. Note: ...