Linux is interesting to me, but I've never dipped my toes into it because it seems really intimidating (and a lot of loud people act pretty snobbish about it towards non-Linux users, making it seem even more intimidating to get into; I'd rather not be bullied for my choices in software or my ignorance in others).
It seems so complicated to me, and there's so many types, and so much lingo that I'm not versed in, so that when I consider getting into it I just feel so overwhelmed I can't even think.
My understanding of Linux is bare bones to say the least. I understand it's highly customizable. I understand it's a lot of manual work, though, at least.. it sounds like it? From what I've seen people say, it seems like you need to remember a lot of codes and functions to do basic things unless you install interfaces for things? Again, I'm really ignorant about this stuff, so excuse my lack of proper terminolgy and such.
I also am under the impression that Linux isn't the greatest for most games? Or at least, that's what I heard a lot years ago, I don't know if it's still true (or if it was even true back then). If that's still a thing, is it because Windows is just what everyone defaults to when designing software? How viable is gaming on Linux?
And how does one even... go about setting up Linux? How do you choose what er... version? Type? Ah, distro? Again this... terminology is foreign to me, I'm not fully sure what I'm saying. Would I have to whipe a laptop of Windows to install Linux on it? How would I do that?
I am fascinated by the concept of Linux but like I said, there's just so much. I have ADHD and Autism and combined, the whole idea of jumping into this is so goddamn overwhelming to consider figuring it out all by myself.
Sorry if this is out of place, by the way.
ETA: Thanks for all the help so far everyone. I'm gonna start playing with various distros using an older laptop of mine. I bought it real cheap and used a few years ago and it has mainly just been used as my own personal tv that only plays Whose Line Is It Anyways? with Drew Carry every moment of every day, virtually nonstop... and the poor thing can do that on Linux just fine, too.
ETA2: After backing up the Whose Line episodes off the laptop, I tested out Ubuntu using virtual box on my regular laptop but it didn't entice me much, so I searched for something else and found "Live Window Maker", a uh, fork(? is that the right term?) of Debian and installed it onto the laptop. So far, successful! I havent explored it much since I finished my backup last night and installed the distro before I left for work, but I'm excited to start playing with it. I really enjoy the classic windows interface styling of this one, so I'm looking forward to playing with it.
Well, at first I was doing it completely manually, following the installation guide, but I'd get so mixed up in the soup of it all with all those new terms and actions that felt completely foreign yo me. Then I found mention of the simple archinstall command which the guide either hadn't mentioned outright or the mentioning of it got drowned out by all the other words.
It took me a long minute to play around and work out how that worked, but once I finally figured out what was what and all that, I would finally start the install and it would get stuck.
It would get to "Waiting for systemd.timesyncd to complete" but it never would (and I gave it the benefit of the doubt at first, and just waited hours the first try.) On googling, I'd get a lot of approximate answers and explanations that almost but didn't quite match, and the solutions never worked. I'd give up for a bit and then go back to trying it, googling, and I started just trying to troubleshoot it on my own despite really not knowing what I was doing and just throwing random things at the wall and seeing what stuck.
Eventually though, I got the right keywords in the right order on google and came across a reddit post of someone with my exact issue. The solution after that was really, really simple. They had solved their issue by editing /etc/systemd/timesyncd.config, where multiple things were commented that shouldn't have been. I did the same thing and went into the .conf and lo and behold, the entire thing was commented, so I fixed that and boom. Working.
Honestly I'm actually glad that I had to go on such a wild goose chase to fix that little issue, because as frustrating and, in the end, useless that whole struggle ended up seeming, I learned a LOT while struggling. I've edited lots of .conf files, I love modding my games so I'm not shy to dipping my toes in and changing basic values, but did I know what the term "commenting" meant in that context, or even how that stuff worked on a deeper, technical level? Nope. Now I do! Now I know how to do some menial tasks via the console that I hadn't used before. I know better how the disks work, I have a better understanding of partitioning, etc.
I think I much prefered this experience over the one where I just popped in Linux Mint and everything was a-ok from the get-go.