You become a shut in during summer because it’s constantly 90+°F outside and AC keeps breaking

I would love to leave the south for cooler climates but I have too much family here so heat stroke it is.

The simplest and the most windows like in looks distro would be Linux mint, it’s probably better than trying Ubuntu or other distros for your first experience with Linux.

If you want a challenge then go for it but just letting you know it’s better start off with a few wins under your belt then getting freaked out by complex systems like fedora made for advanced users.

In the US, I mainly use card at stores, but I like buying things from FB marketplace and tend to use cash unless seller doesn’t want to use cash.

I daily drive Linux mint and love using fish, I do have a custom built NAS but I rarely ssh into it, so I’m not limited by it, but as some mention that if you’re a dev and do a lot of SSH/remote controlling then it might work against you if you form too many habits.

I learned that PopOs runs best on iMac with least amount of problems, I don’t know if that will fix audio but you can always download PopOs on a flash drive and boot to it to try out without installing it on drive.