@shansterable @PurpleJillybeans Hi Shannon! I can offer suggestions based on my personal path.

In order to get a hang of how the interface works, what worked well and not well, I started with a Virtual Machine (like VMWare but there are others out there). Download the type of Linux you want (people said Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora). You are looking for an ISO image to use on the Virtual Machine.

Try it out, see if you can do everyday stuff on it over time. Technically it will be running Linux within Windows. MS can still screenshot here.

Then you can install an image on a USB stick and boot from it. It should be able to access and change your files on your main storage. And it won’t run code from Windows. But if things get daunting or you can’t do something, you can always reboot back into Windows.

Honestly I spent a couple years using Linux from the USB stick. And it took me a bit more than 10 years from my first virtual machine to removing Windows from my computer.

So try it out at your own pace.