For a total beginner, I’m gonna spell it out for you out of the gate. Linux has never been the hard part of linux. The biggest hurdle of linux—the one thing beginners waste the most time on, old timers always insist you should learn, and won’t actually give you much value in return—is package management. Package management is an unnecessary but unavoidable part of traditional linux usage. For everything else, linux just works more or less the way almost all other computing devices commonly behave. Better in some regards, different in others, but always sensible and familiar.

Now, there’s a way to bypass this hurdle and just go straight to the fun part of using your computer. Use an immutable distro. I recommend Aurora as a good general purpose OS. But anything from the universal blue project is good. Bluefin for a different style of desktop environment, Bazzite for gaming. There are some nags here and there, and you can learn about the whole terminal commands and package management over time at your own pace, or maybe not at all, but you’ll always have a functioning system. Software is installed from an online store via containers. There’s little to no management as your data is always separate from the OS.

If you’ve ever used an android phone, then you’ve already used an immutable system. This is just better and more open for the desktop and laptops over Linux. But they’re the same principles. Let the experts cook and you focus on using your computer.