and it seems like the only people that use Linux are HEAVILY experienced with those things I just listed… HOWEVER… I’m not.

Nah. Or at least, it should just work if you boot from your USB.

Just try it.

There’s nothing stopping you from making a boot key and messing with Linux or making a partition of your storage. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

That said, as someone who is also very visually inclined, I’ve tried a couple of different distros over the years and always bounced off. I kept encountering the dumbest little issues that most people didn’t get, and it always required Terminal to fix. It’s those moments when you get to learn how obtuse and unwelcoming some of the Linux community can be.

You will get comments both ways on this, but I have put lots of people on Linux Mint and they never once had to use a terminal unless they wanted to. Make no mistake, what you can do in a terminal is magic compared to what you can do without it, but you can survive just fine without it. I would suggest also looking at Zorin, and if you really want something different I strongly recommend Bodhi. Most of the distros which are easy for new users are on a Debian or Ubuntu base (Ubuntu is on a Debian base, but a lot of people forget that).

If you do decide to do it, use an LLM. That shit will turbo charge your learning curve.

As side note, you can start learning now or later, choice is your. This is just an opinion tho

The reason why people talk so much about the terminal is:

1. It’s easier to tell newbies “input this command” than to guide them through a GUI.
2. The terminal gives you a lot of flexibility to customise stuff.

You’ll probably want to learn the terminal for any serious customisation. However, you don’t need to deal with it in your everyday usage.

I’d suggest you to use a Live USB, like other users recommended. Linux Mint, plus plenty other distros, can run straight from the USB. It’ll be better for you to judge if you could/should be using Linux this way.

About the thousand distros, most of them don’t matter. And if you’re a newbie, stick to Mint and you’ll probably not regret it.

Get a live version of any distro burned into an USB.

You can give it a try this way without compromising anything.

I DO NOT want to be forced to use a terminal just to get the most outta my operating system. I like having some kind of UI to use.

Hmm… I want to ask why you feel this way and if you already have tried using a terminal at all, but it sounds like your mind is already made up on this. You can definitely get pretty far without ever opening a terminal, using modern DEs like KDE or GNOME. I think you’ll have the best experience if you keep an open mind and accept that there could be times when the terminal might be the easiest way to go. Disclaimer: I am biased towards using the terminal and prefer to use it instead of GUIs.

I’d encourage you to try a LiveUSB. The way this works: you copy a full, working Linux system to a USB flashdrive (this will overwrite all data on the drive) and boot directly from it, so that you can play around with it a bit like a trial without modifying anything on your computer. If you don’t know what distro to go with, personally I recommend starting here: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/download This will have the KDE Plasma desktop environment which should feel pretty familiar to Windows. If you don’t instantly fall in love but still are curious, you can always overwrite the USB again and try a different distro or even Fedora with a dfferent desktop environment (the official “default” desktop environment for Fedora is GNOME, but PERSONALLY I am not a GNOME fan, and its workflow will be slightly different than what you are used to from Windows). One caveat to this is that running from a USB drive will likely be pretty slow, so keep that in mind and try not to worry about the performance/speed during this trial. Linux can be extremely performant, and is used to power the world’s fastest supercomputers. If you decide you want to stick with it and install Linux to your hard drive, it will be a lot snappier than running from USB.

There are a lot of distros out there, and that is understandably overwhelming. So basically what is going on here, with Linux there are many many options and choices for different software for everything from system tools, desktop environments, package managers, text editors, whatever. It’s like how you can choose from Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Brave, etc for your web browser on Windows, except there are potential choices for pretty much ever part of the system.

Each distro will have already made a lot of these choices for you, so that you can just get started using it out of the box. If you don’t know much about Linux, then you probably really don’t have an opinion yet or care about these choices yet, for example, which package manager you are using. If you want to be making some choices now, I’d focus on choosing a distro that comes with a desktop environment that appeals to you, as this will be the most visible difference between them to a new Linux user.

Some distros are geared for specific use-cases, like Kali Linux is for hacking/security testing, so comes pre-packaged with a lot of tools that hackers and security professionals would use. Some distros aim to be very stable and offer a system that you can rely on to JustWork™️. Others are cutting edge with the latest, brand new versions of software, but this is not as stable or reliable. Some allow you to build much of your system and make most of these choices for yourself. More recently, there are some gaming focused distros.

I linked Fedora Linux above, which is a good balance between stable and cutting edge IMO. Mint is another that is great for your first time trying Linux. A lot of people love Mint, but my personal opinion is that I do not like it as much as others, but I’d still take it over Windows.

Let me put it this way, decide if you want to fuck around for hours to get everything working as you want it (and yes, that will most probably involve the terminal or trusting random people’s suggestions) or if you prefer to keep using something you know just works.

You really don’t need to use the terminal if you don’t want to. The only reason so many people use it is because it’s usually the most efficient way to get stuff done, and it’s easier to show a terminal command than it is to show how to do something on each and every desktop since they all vary slightly.

When it comes to installing apps, Linux is actually not that different from how you install them on your phone. Most distros will have some kind of software center that you can use to install apps. Check here first before searching online. Most apps are NOT downloaded using your web browser.

Stick with a distro that’s been around forever. Newer distros have a lot of buzz, but they lack support and you’ll eventually come across a problem that you won’t know how to solve.

I have used zorin os and have not had to fiddle with it at the command prompt level any more than I have with windows installs.

Okay:

You don’t have to deal with scripting and command-line stuff, but all the major tinkering under the hood depends on it. The amount of customisation and tinkering is fairly infinite, so past a certain point you just can’t build graphical stuff to cover every single possible choice - and that’s where the gibberish comes in.

Baseline concepts:

‘Operating system’ means different things in different contexts, and this can be confusing.

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Context 1: technically correct

Your computer has a big chip that runs programs, and a bunch of hardware that actually-does-stuff: network card, graphics card, disk drive, mouse, keyboard etc. Programs need to talk to the hardware and make it do stuff, or else they don’t actually… do… anything.

There’s two problems with that:

There’s a gazillion kinds of hardware out there, that all has its own language for talking to it, and your program would either only run on one EXACT set of hardware, or it would have to speak all gazillion languages and be too big to fit on your machine.

The second problem is that in order to do more than one thing at a time, you need a bunch of programs all running at once, and they all need to use the hardware, and without something to coordinate the sharing, they’ll all just fight over it and everything falls down in a tangled heap.

A good analogy for this is a restaurant. They aren’t just public kitchens where you can just wander in and start preparing your own meal, taking ingredients/equipment/space however you want, then just carry it to whatever table takes your fancy - and you definitely can’t have all the customers doing it at once. Especially if they don’t know how all the equipment works, where the different ingredients are kept, etc - it would be an absolute disaster, and there would be fights, injuries, fire and food poisoning.

So instead there’s an agreed-upon system with rules, and people that do the cooking for you. You make a reservation or queue at the desk, you are told which table you can have, you go sit there and a waiter brings you a menu. You pick the food - and depending on the place, maybe ask for customisation - then wait and they bring it out to you, then you sit there, eat it, then leave.

That system-with-rules is the operating system, or more specifically the operating system kernel. Any time a program wants to do more than think to itself, it has to asks the OS to do it, and bring it the results.

In this analogy, fundamentally different operating systems (windows / linux / OSX / android / etc) would be like different kinds of (5-star / sushi-train / pizza place / burger joint / etc) that have different rules and expectations and social-scripts to interact with them. A program written for one OS would have no idea how to ask a different OS for what it wanted, and wouldn’t be able to run there.

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Context 2: what people usually mean

It’s all well and good to have a machine that can run programs and do things, but the human sitting in front of it needs to be able to interact with the thing, so you can poke buttons and move files around and move windows and stuff.

And so there needs to be a crapton of programs all working with each other on the thing to provide all this functionality, and the whole user experience - preferably with a consistent design language and general expectation of how everything should work: you need a desktop environment.

In restaruant terms, this would be the specific brand/franchise/corporate-culture that runs the place. Yes, the general idea is that it’s a burger joint, but specifically it’s a mcdonalds, or a wendy’s, or whatever that homophobic chickenburger place is called - it’s got the decor, it’s got the layout, it’s got the specific combo meals, etc etc, the same uniforms, the same staff policy, etc.

Now here’s the thing:

Let’s say there’s only one sushi franchise in the world. That’s like Windows - there’s updates new versions and some slight variations (server versions aside), but you walk into one, you’ve walked into them all. There’s one Windows kernel, and one windows desktop environment that goes with it.

And say there’s only one pizza-place franchise in the world, and they all look the same, have the same menu. That’s like OSX: there’s one kernel, and similarly one OSX desktop enviroment to go with it. A mac is a mac, and it does mac things.

But linux… linux is different. With Linux, it’s there’s 900 different burger-joint franchises in the world, and literally anyone can go start a new one if they want to put the time into designing one from the ground up. The paradigm is the same - order at the counter at the back, menus on the wall overhead, grab bench seating wherever or get it to go - but every place can design the look and feel, the menu, the deals, the other amenities, the staffing structure, etc.

And the different franchises - that’s what distros are.

It’s the set of programs all working together that create a whole working enviroment, but everything uses the standard kernel to actually get stuff done. If your program can run in one linux distro, then it should be able to run in a different one, because your program uses the same standard set of requests in order to do things.

The windows and the menus and the desktop apps and the way the interface behaves and how you configure everything can be different, but the core functionality that the software uses, is the same.

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Now, for the most part, Windows is like NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE, all the fiddly internal bits are carefully hidden away and made deliberately opaque. You don’t need to know, we don’t want to tell you, we’ll let you change the wallpaper, but for everything else, we decide how it’s wired up. If you want it to do things slightly differently to suit your own workflow, tough.

Macs are kind of the same deal: for the most part it’s no-touchee, you’ll break stuff. Just push the very shiny buttons and be happy that everything Just Works ™.

But Linux… doesn’t seal anything in plastic. All the gubbins are not only there on display, they’re mostly all human-readable and human-tinkerable with. Instead of mysterious monolithic chunks of software communicating with each other via hidden channels, with configuration in databases you don’t get to see… it’s mostly scripts you can read and tinker with, and plain-text config files you can edit, all writing useful details in highly-visible log files that you can read through when things don’t do what they’re supposed to.

Now with a lot of distros, you absolutely can just push buttons and treat the thing like a Windows box, and never have to tinker with the fiddly bits. You’ve got a browser, you’ve got apps, you’ve got games, it just does the thing. But if you want to start getting technical, you absolutely can - unlike windows or mac.

But this very ability to configure and tinker and patch bits on - and the fact that most distros don’t have a gigantic microsoft-sized coordinated team all following one shared vision, but are wired together like a kind of junkyard frankenstein from thousands of separate teams as a labour of love - means that occasionally you will need to get technical to deal with small annoyances or use-cases they didn’t think of.

btw, if you decide you want to use linux, build the PC for it. don’t build it now and then decide the OS. a lot of people have issues because they use linux with uncommon hardware meant for other OSes.

however, maybe try a liveUSB first. you can get used to it and decide if its for you.

You won’t do it.

I DO NOT want to be forced to use a terminal

I challenge you to fresh install any version of Windows and never use CMD Prompt, Powershell, or Regedit for any reason, ever.

It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.

Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.

It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.

Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.

But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.

As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.

My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.

Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.

If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first