Another comment: fedora is a good distro. Mint is also good. Both are pretty straightforward, will do what you want, and are easy to work with. They are recommended a lot for good reason.

There are three main types of software.

1. software installed from the distribution’s repositories
2. flatpaks - which are basically sandboxed software bundled with their own dependencies
3. app images - which are basically executables like a windows .exe

When looking for software, I think most people install them in that order. (Some distros are immutable and therefore 2) is often the first choice but that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit)

Hope this helps.

The answer to starting fresh is to format the entire drive and reparation the whole thing. All operating system installers ship with tools to do that. Some are easier to use than others, but they are all there. You’re looking for “custom install or custom partitioning or manual partitioning” or something like that. Usually during the “where do you want to install” questions.

It’s not hard to do, but it’s often hidden a little bit because formatting and/or repartitioning the wrong drive nukes the drive.

In your case, just go to town. Know how big your drive is, delete all existing partitions, and the new ones you create should total up to the size of the drive. Just make sure you’re doing it to the right drive if you have more than one :)

With Linux, you can get fancy making separate partitions for home and stuff, but you don’t really need to worry about that if you don’t want to. You can just nuke the drive, and then tell the os to “use the whole drive” and just let it do its thing.

If you want to understand it deeper and better, I’d suggest watching some videos for your distro.

Have fun!

I mean, it’s always been this way on the internet. Somewhere in the mid to late 90’s, a language and communication program (http and web browsers) became very popular and synonymous with “the internet.” But us old farts remember when Usenet, gopher, ftp, fsp, irc, etc. were all used daily. As the World Wide Web enshittifies, people will either stay or move elsewhere, just like they always did.

The real question in my mind is more akin to the movement between physical networks - such as when we moved away from bbs, to college proprietary connections, and ultimately to the internet. I often wonder why - with all of the portable WiFi radios we all own - why hasn’t anyone created an encrypted protocol and software where we all join our personal hardware into one big giant mesh network? I don’t even live in a city in an apartment and I can pick up 4 neighbor’s WiFi signals, never mind all the cell phones and whatnot passing by my house. You’d think we could have an encrypted and robust way of sending packets to each other by now over our personal private hardware (albeit slow and probably prone to buffering as nodes move in and out of connection range).

Oftentimes I think that’s the next frontier.