Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)

Wow. Talk about coincidences...

you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.

I'm a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it's literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it's smooth sailing.

(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)

Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I'm running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I've found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it's so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don't care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I'm like...just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn't.