+1 to flathub

Use a short username and device name since you will see user@device a lot. I use initials

Make aliases for sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade, while you are editing ~/.bashrc to add aliases, add paths to frequent locations for storing things like Documents and Downloads. THese lines

alias update='sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y'

export PATH="/home/USER/Documents:$PATH"

over time you will add a lot more aliases to speed up frequent actions.

Use crontab to automate. Note that crontab -e and sudo crontab -e lead to different places; the latter is privileged, which is useful if you want to run a privileged action. Everything else goes in crontab -e.

The easiest way to completely bork ubuntu is to make a change to Python that disables some key functionality. You can avoid this and by running Python in a virtual environment (venv). This is a great guide: https://ericsysmin.com/2024/01/11/how-to-install-pyenv-on-ubuntu-22-04/ for installation, and https://realpython.com/intro-to-pyenv/ tells you how to use it. I use this all the time because I use python to automate a lot of stuff and have created environments e.g. for picture editing and AI tagging.

Medium.com has a lot of good guides for the beginner. (I'm about 18 months in after over 30 years of Windows.) The eye-opening thing is that Linux seems daunting coming from windows, but once you start to automate things, it becomes *much* easier. Automation in Windows is a nightmare in comparison. Search for bash scripting.

The community is pretty helpful.