Bazzite is exactly that. You can't break it unless you read and study how to break it, intentionally. Flash it to a USB drive, boot to the installer, done. You'll never worry about drivers, updates, ads, spyware, telemetry, that will be a thing of the past.

Well, there are a lot of newb-friendly distros these days. Some options:

• Linux Mint (any spin) - one of the easiest to get help with online, with minimal compromises
• Fedora - also pretty easy to get help w/ online
• Bazzite - great if you just want to play games; it's about as close to SteamOS as you get w/o an official release

Any of those should be pretty friendly to users new to Linux, and they go roughly in order from fitness as a regular desktop (top down) to fitness for gaming (bottom up), but any of them can handle gaming and desktop stuff pretty equivalently.

beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.

Well... if you actually want to learn, as we ALL did, get yourself a device you can literally set on fire. By that I mean a RPi 3 (probably going for 10 EUR nowadays) or a 2nd hand laptop. If you can't find that easily, try a virtual machine, if you don't want to bother give a whirl (with a ad blocker...) to https://distrosea.com/ and come back, risk free.

It's honestly empowering to learn and it has been relevant for decades (basically since the UNIX days) and STILL is relevant today in the time of the "cloud" where all such commands are still used.

I was the same as you about 6 months ago. I installed Bazzite and never looked back. Sure, there might be some quirks but overall my pc works much better. I can even finally use Steam Link reliably!

I feared making the plunge as well but it was so seamless tbh. Got Linux Mint and it just feels like a newer version of old Windows. Not sure how it's with other distros, but I find it to be precicely Linux for dummies.

I'd say the difficulty to getting used to new environment was on a similar level to getting from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you can dual boot I recommend just trying it - the water is fine.

Some things that may help you get started:

1. All of the risk in changing your computer operating system comes from the potential loss of data. Everything else is replaceable/recoverable, including your original Windows install if needed. You can avoid this risk by backing up your personal data to an external drive, which frankly everyone should be doing anyway because hard drives are consumables.

2. You can try Linux with no risk by running it as a live OS. This loads the operating system files into RAM from an external device (typically a USB drive) and makes no changes to the system hard drive. This lets you test your computer's functionality in Linux without making permanent changes (does my graphics card work? wifi? audio? etc). The mainstream Linux installers do this already for the installation process, but you can just load one up to try things out without running the installation process.

3. You don't have to completely switch off of Windows. It's fairly easy to install Linux as a dual-boot on an existing Windows system. As long as you have some free space on your hard drive to dedicate to Linux, you can just keep your Windows install and have Linux too. You can even access your files in Windows from the Linux install. All of the mainstream Linux installers have the option for setting up dual-boot during the installation.

4. I think one of the biggest hurdles for switching over is knowing what software to use in Linux (how do I edit a document? watch a movie? read a pdf? etc). There are options for basically anything you might want to do, but if you don't know what you're looking for you might feel a bit lost. I recommend alternativeto.net for this. You can search for software like Microsoft Office and filter for Linux to get a list of compatible software options that do the same job.

I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.

I know exactly how you feel. I have wrecked so many OS installs I've lost track. I have friends who tell me I have tech problems like no one else. I seem to stumble into edge cases on a higher-than-average basis.

My point is, when I say that everything is recoverable, that's from experience. I've done it enough times to know there's very little chance of actually making a computer unusable, though it's relatively easy to lose your data if you're not paying attention to what you doing - so backups. Always backups.

If you try this a couple times you'll start to see your computer as something that you have control over, something that you can completely wipe and bring back or rebuild into a different system as you please. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions.