It isnt that hard, moved from wondows 10 to mint, and a few months later to arch, and it took me less than 2 hours to install arch, and thats with slow internet.

And i learned a lot whole doing it, like Dekstop environments, disk partitoning(root, swap, and boot), filesystems, and a lot more.

I wouldnt recommend it to everyone, but it is great if you want to learn more about computers.

Mint is the best to start tbh.

And you could stay in mint for years and barely have to use bash, and when you do there is a well stocked forum, so it is sometimes even easier than windows to troubleshoot.

Can't you just add swap?

I think you can run some apps purely on swap and keep your ram for vscode only