yess, that's exactly the one I had in mind!

This is the absolutely perfect way to describe what it's like listening to Linux fans give advice to newcomers.

I'm not a computer person at all and the most I did with my Windows laptop was gently prodding the drivers to fix themselves. I have experience with basic C++ and Javascript but thats back when I was in high school and I was never really good at it. I would love to move to Linux but honestly yeah the hurdle seems too big. The thought of rendering my laptop unusable for a few days and fucking it up even further to the point of no takesies backsies scares me.

But oh well, I need to save up for a new laptop first before worrying about these things lol

Which is kinda sad. The console always feels like a more precise way to deal with a problem. So it's like people are saying "Using a mouse is too scary, I'd rather use a WiiMote while wearing mittens"

People don't need to type console commands. They're just the easiest way to tell someone how to do something in text.

It's more than that, too. Even when there are GUI things (like the network manager in my system now) the GUIs are badly designed (because it turns out that UX design is an actual, learnable, technical field!), and, further, inconsistent from one piece to another so there's little in the way of shared learning. When you learn one of these little GUI utilities you've learned ... that one ... GUI ... utility.

At that point you might as well be typing stuff like ls -laR ~/Documents | awk '{print $9}' | grep -v '^\.' | xargs -I{} file {} | grep -i 'ascii\|unicode\|utf' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -I{} sh -c 'head -n 5 "{}" | nl -ba -s": " | sed "s/^/$(basename {}): /"' | less -N

(Fake command line supplied by long-suffering SO who got a kick out of making something incredibly stupid.)

This is self-fulfilling bullshit. Everyone is saying that typing words is somehow scary, so everyone is scared of typing words.
Average user doesn't really has more problems with console, either they care enough to google how to fix the problem, and do whatever Internet tells them, or they don't and they ask for help and kick the problem down the chain. Will the solution involve typing words or clicking checkboxes is kind of irrelevant

Linux is written by doctors? It's all in your head, mate!

I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn't get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.

Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn't seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn't supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.