I would get comfortable with the idea of breaking things. Make regular backups of your data. The best that I'm aware of for making it easy to work backwards from breaking things is NixOS, but I wouldn't consider it beginner friendly.
You learn a lot from trying to bring a system back online. But it depends if you're trying Linux to learn it more or just to take advance of privacy.
I don't want to break my system drastically if i were to learn along the way using it without any knowledge. I want a stable os while also doing stuff I'd normally do on Windows.
It shouldn't break if you just install packages from the main app installer. It's more of a concern if you're trying to install anything from source.
Also make sure to try a live cd or live USB to make sure the OS is compatible with your hardware. VM is not sufficient for this last one. This is usually only an issue if you have very new hardware.
I would get comfortable with the idea of breaking things. Make regular backups of your data. The best that I'm aware of for making it easy to work backwards from breaking things is NixOS, but I wouldn't consider it beginner friendly.
You learn a lot from trying to bring a system back online. But it depends if you're trying Linux to learn it more or just to take advance of privacy.
I don't want to break my system drastically if i were to learn along the way using it without any knowledge. I want a stable os while also doing stuff I'd normally do on Windows.
It shouldn't break if you just install packages from the main app installer. It's more of a concern if you're trying to install anything from source.
Also make sure to try a live cd or live USB to make sure the OS is compatible with your hardware. VM is not sufficient for this last one. This is usually only an issue if you have very new hardware.