@PurpleJillybeans To fellow Linux users (I’ll address those looking into Linux, below): If you can’t be welcoming, maybe be quiet. When new users to the space have questions we find are so utterly basic to the use of Linux that they seem preposterous to ask, when they ask questions so badly phrased that we can barely remember lacking the vocabulary or experience or tools to describe a problem (ANY problem), take a breath. If you don’t have the bandwidth to help, don’t. But there’s no reason to make someone feel bad for asking for help. How would you have felt, had it happened to you?
Maybe it DID happen to you. Maybe you think it was the “tough love” you needed to become a self-sufficient Linux user.
But maybe, just maybe, that made a toxic situation worse, that never needed to be in the first place.
Users DO need, eventually, to have the tools to figure things out (largely) for themselves. But being acrimonious toward them simply for wanting to have a good experience with their computer (whatever experience that is, and it may be different from your own, and THAT’S OK) is a waste of your energy and mental health, and only leaves them with a bad experience of Linux.
So say something helpful, or don’t say anything at all.

NOW, for both people who may guide new users, and for potential new Linux users themselves (Welcome! I will use words & acronyms here you may not know. Feel free to ask; please don’t DM, but start a new public thread, so we don’t fill this one up.): For myself, I feel that recommending a largely pre-set-up distro that visually resembles Windows (like Linux Mint) is a great start. Given the reliance on an LTS (of Ubuntu, or if LMDE, of Debian), they may not get the bleeding-edge driver support that games benefit from, if that’s their goal. But then Flatpak installations of say, Steam, will for most of their development cycle include newer components than the .deb or snap packages shipped with an LTS distro. They won’t usually be as bleeding-edge as those shipped with an Arch-based distro, but I’ll try to deal with that below.
More seasoned than a Linux newbie, but not in IT or coding or anything, I myself even have a use case for Linux Mint (on older hardware, that doesn’t benefit from the bleeding edge as much as it does from stability), and I’ve grown to love its Cinnamon interface. I myself run LMDE rather than regular Linux Mint, cuz I don’t like many of the decisions that Canonical (parent company of Ubuntu, upon which regular Linux Mint is based) have made over the years. The interface is largely the same between the two, with only driver configuration (when needed; they’re both pretty good with older hardware out of the box) and kernel choice being substantively different for people not yet adept with the command line.
On my own personal daily driver/gaming desktop rig, I run Arch (ha ha, BTW; I’m not trying to lord it over anyone; I’m trying to illustrate the diversity of options & that even seasoned users can have various use cases for desktop Linux). Since I took time to address the “Arch, BTW” meme, I might as well admit that it IS harder to set up than simply trying out a Linux Mint ISO, making sure you have backups of all your data, and then nervously hitting “install,” and watching the installer wipe out your drive & installing all the components of Linux Mint for you. And having written that sentence, I recognize you may be feeling like, “Wait, there’s something HARDER than that? That’s GOODBYE to everything I’ve always known!”
So I won’t get into installing Arch. I WILL say that without fearing the wrath of anyone, there’s a great (long, involved) wiki on it. And (pro tip) there’s a pretty great install script called archinstall that they put on their own install media, IF you’re comfortable with the command line (AND if you’re comfortable with the installation process occasionally crashing & you having to start over from a blank disk; not common any more, but any script can hit a condition it doesn’t know how to handle).
If however you’re saying, “But I want what you have: a bleeding-edge gaming rig!,” realize: a) it’s not bleeding edge hardware; the very latest hardware often has Windows drivers out for it BEFORE the Linux drivers, but Linux is catching up & sometimes surpassing Windows in this regard, depending on company partnerships, and b) you don’t need bleeding edge hardware to game enjoyably. I’ll wait for a moment to let that sink in, because that’s not what an entire set of technology industries has been telling you since you first knew computers existed.
Now, Debian and/or Ubuntu distros tend to go for reliability & user-friendliness, while Arch-based distros tend to go for the bleeding (and potentially unstable) edge and infinite configurability. Arch itself adds a light footprint to that philosophy, but many distros based off of it tend to eschew that idea in favor of features (often ones beneficial to their users, but still often a Swiss Army knife of them when you may just need a scalpel).
Arch-based distros I’d recommend to newbies include… well, at the moment likely just EndeavourOS. While there IS some command line for newbies to get through, EndeavourOS serves it up on as much of a platter as possible (literally describes what to do at the top of the update window in which you do it, then tells you to hit enter when you’re done, to close the window), and like Arch, they too have a great wiki, and a fairly welcoming forum (I didn’t mention above, but Linux Mint too has a welcoming forum… though in both forums, YMMV, which I suppose for Linux overall, is why this thread exists!).
I would specifically steer a newbie AWAY FROM Manjaro; both an occasionally toxic forum, and developers who aren’t great at maintaining the security or compatibility of their product. Just… don’t (and if you love Manjaro, you’re welcome to politely, with cogent arguments as to why, disagree. That won’t make me use or recommend it, but hearing your thoughts might appeal to someone who finds it to be “their thing.” That’s the beauty of Linux: while there are a million confusing options, what you want may be out there, and you may be able to make it yourself!).
Other Arch-based options exist; CachyOS, Garuda Linux. I don’t hate them, but find they have too many bells & whistles for my needs or taste. I was interested in finding whether CachyOS’s optimizations for v3 CPUs would produce any performance results, but like Phoronix, I found they didn’t. YMMV if you have a v4 CPU?
Most Arch-based distros come with KDE Plasma as their default Desktop Environment (or DE). It is Windows-like in layout & appearance. But I personally think all of its possible configurations & bells & whistles can be pretty quickly overwhelming, to the point of pretty easily breaking even default setups. Also, for my gaming use case, I found that performance isn’t QUITE up to that of GNOME (a more Mac-like interface, if we’re painting in truly broad strokes). Tech buzzword aficionados (who are not wrong; I just won’t explain all the buzzwords here cuz I’ve already written ridiculously long for a social media post) will tell you that KDE handles more standards like VRR & HDR than GNOME does out of the box (though a command line tweak for VRR on the latest version of GNOME is pretty simple). Also, GNOME doesn’t strictly adhere to design standards on some interface elements (like their default “Adwaita” icons). But GNOME works better for me, so I use it.
How do you install these DEs? On any of these Arch-based (but not Arch) distros, just select it in the installer that comes on the ISO. On Arch itself, it’s a bit more involved than I’ll get here. But either archinstall or the Arch wiki will help. And on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, it’s generally a choice you make when you choose the “flavor,” or the ISO, or something else that is set before you ever insert anything in your computer.
DO read up further on your choice of distro, both what the makers of said distro say on their website, as well as how people treat each other on the forums. I hope you don’t end up on the forums A LOT (cuz I hope your distro “just works” for you as much as possible), but knowing you have a resource in case it doesn’t work perfectly or you can’t figure something out, where you have a reasonable expectation of not getting yelled at, is ideal.
I know Windows has been your home for what feels like forever. But you can back up your data, keep it YOURS (and not Microsoft’s), and make a foray into this new land of Linux! Good luck!