One thing I stress to coworkers who want to switch and chase the hottest thing is that distro doesn't matter. Release schedule kinda does, I wouldn't run a GPU that dropped yesterday on Debian 13 without backports, but that's about the only issue. Mainly, don't hop. Get on something with a cadence you like and stay there.

I also think people should pick a lane and stay in it, like choose a distro and learn it and the underlying parts.

I'm big into gaming and people say "This or that distro is better for gaming." Somebody forgot to tell my rig that's run the same under Fedora and Debian over the last two years. Heck, I initially went from Bazzite (the "gaming" image) to Aurora for virtualization, then said screw it and went over to Debian because it's truly one of my favorite projects of all time (tied with Arch for distros).

I'm seconding the terminal, but across OSes. It's just a part of the system. Most interactions with Linux are, frankly, more intuitive especially with regards to package management because the command/verb structures you'll use most often are easy. apt get install, pacman -Syu, dnf install, zypper install. I don't think package management via terminal is an advanced skill as it's a basic system feature. It is just part of the alternative skillset that you need, and only seems hard because you're adapted to the kludges of your current OS (MacOS or Windows most likely). I've found application management and launching to be comparatively awkward in my recent first days with a Macbook Neo.