If you’ve no prior experience with Linux, I’d say just try using it. For the average computer user, the overall experience will be very similar to Windows or Mac.

Go easy on yourself, and don’t try to do/learn everything all at once. Just use the system like you would any other. Once you’re comfortable with the overall experience, you can then tackle more complex stuff if/when you feel the need.

Edit: Just wanted to add that Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu are all solid choices for beginners.

As in part of a review process?

Things like:

• Software update process
• Installing software which isn’t in a repository
• Seeing how the community is for support ?

It sounds as you want to evaluate different Linux Distributions.

DE/GUI is a good one, terminal commands is a bit useless since the vast majority of Linux systems use Bash as default.

This is what I would look into on a new distro:

UI - What DE or WM is it using, what is the default config like, and try to learn from that. How is the terminal prompt configured (the default Ubuntu and Debian prompts are terrible, I allways change them)

Package Manager - how does it work, what software is available?

Unique software - Does the distribution include some tools, applications or games I haven’t heard about? If so, what do they do, and how do they work.

This gives me a feel for the distribution and how to use it.

While it’s a bit off topic regarding the question, if you want a quick glimpse of what’s out there, try https://distrosea.com/

Naaah… you know enough by now. Just try to replace Windows from your friends’ PCs with Linux. And tell them to do the same soon too.

First and foremost, that my hardware peripherals work with it (wifi card, camera, bt stuff if you have it…) - if not (and hope you don’t nor would be frustrated by it happens), that there’s a way to make it work

It depends on your goals with linux.

If your goals are on devops, you may find a good idea learn about docker, ansible and other tools to make your life easier. If you’re a home user, maybe it’s a good idea try flatpaks, for example. And there is much more, but you need to define your goals.

“If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Terminal stuff. I change from bash to fish and love fish. Although I believe it’s not posix compliant or something

Spin up a VM in the distro of your choice and try to install everything you might need or want (like VPN clients, remote desktop software, gaming platforms, video production stuff, etc.). See if you can do everything you need, and highlight any problem areas to see if you need to explore alternatives or if there’s things you can live without.

The DE is pretty surface level, these days, since they all work pretty well for most people, and the terminal apps are pretty standardized. Focus on how you might use your computer from day to day.

Try in what way?

I would recommend against Manjaro for messing with the Arch packages & other weird decisions that anger that community, Fedora for not having LTS kernels, & sadly base Debian for desktop with the apps often being stable but way out of date.

Most distros operate about the same as far as software & will as a result likely feel more or less the same. The biggest exceptions are how GuixOS & NixOS do declarative, stateless config symlinking in config/executables from the store. If you wanna get into dev, these will force you into the right mindset & are worth checking eut, but will definitely be too cumbersome for someone that isn’t committing the steeper learning curve & ‘just wants to run things’.

things that differ between distros, because everyone thinks they can do it better than others: multimedia and sound, firewall config, service management, different init systems, switching default when multiple packages provide the same feature and are installed in parallel, config file migration during updates, making and installing your own custom kernel, selection of free games available.

Couple of things that might be useful:

• Setup remote desktop access using VNC/RDP. It can be useful to access your PC etc while using your phone or other devices. Or accessing a raspberry pi on your main PC
• Setup a virtual machine and install Windows in it. It might be a good way to think about migrating to linux as your main OS
• Steam. See how performance on Linux compares to Windows for your games.

If you mean for picking which distro you like, assuming you don’t want something unique like qubes or nixos the only thing that really matters is DE and package manager, everything else you can install/uninstall as you see fit (if you really want to you can change the DE yourself too)

Every Debian based distro is the same operating system underneath with different stuff installed, every redhat based system is the same story

That said certain distros come with a lot more pre installed that you probably want (for example the zip command)

Try doing everything you would normally do with a computer and see how you would do it on linux.