Thanks for all the responses, I really appreciate it! I’ve editing my post rather than respond to each one. Just wanna say that while Linux seems intimidating, I’m realizing I was being overly cautious and thought each distro was like it’s own OS instead of just a variation. You guys really come out to help out newbies, so thank you!

That’s the problem, I’m freelance and barely scraping by haha. I’d love to grab something to try out but it ain’t gonna happen right now. My laptop is a Samsung galaxy book3 ultra which I slapped Mint on a while back and had issues and went back with a cracked windows 11. Apparently linux and the galaxy book line don’t play well. But, I’m very tempted to try another distro on it first, like bazzite. Probably be the smart thing before touching my main PC.