Go for a popular/“beginner” distro (basically mint or fedora or fedoraKDE, or Bazzite for gaming) so you can search up anything you need, and before you install anything test it all out with the live boot disk you created; keep backups and don’t be afraid to fuck up, at worst you reinstall and you can script much of the set up process; and do not be afraid of the terminal, learn its secrets, watch a “bash beginner” and “linux terminal beginner” video or a few on youtube and follow along like it’s a class, you’ll be fine.

That’s it, you’ll have specific questions later, but for now that’s all you need.

Tempted to put this through let me google that for you just to be smug, but here’s the direct link instead since I’m sure I’d also need to click the results for you. Do I need to read this to you too?

https://windowsreport.com/disable-keylogger-windows-11/

Not even my claim, yet I googled it for you. Guess the burden is on a third party who happened to know this common knowledge already.

And for linux step 3 usually doesn’t works because your local techy is probably someone who just knows how to google and paste into cmd the terminal.

This was sorta my fault, but I’m counting it. I have been flashing meshtastic devices recently and flashed two just fine from fedora (just had to DL ungoogled chromium because fuck chrome but librewolf can’t access serial ports so…), tried to flash a third from my friend’s windows PC and it just would not recognize it in the serial monitor, tried for like an hour being dumb, then I remembered drivers exist, downloaded one set of drivers, couldn’t install lord knows why, downloaded a second set that finally worked on a reboot and got it flashed.

I understand that sometimes you still have to install drivers on Linux too, but can we stop pretending you don’t have to on windows? What’s more while I was in there and edge wasn’t using my serial port my friend said to install a chrome based anyway to try, and I had to find the damn download pages instead of using a package manager, philistines.