Oof, I wish I could spend an afternoon with you teaching you some very basic linux things. I wish there were an easy way to share my knowledge with you, because with literally an afternoon spent together with me (or any other semi-knowledgable linux user who enjoys teaching) learning, you'd be in a much better place to understand how to interact with a linux system.

But through text like this, in this medium, I'm just not going to be very helpful! We need to talk about overarching linux concepts, like, how the file system works (because it's pretty different from windows), what package managers are and how to interact with them, basic command line functions, stuff like that. And I just can't be responsive to your questions in a forum like this!

I'm sorry your experience has been so unpleasant! EndeavourOS is a great distro (it's what I use), but it certainly isn't beginner-friendly. On the plus side, if you get comfortable with it, you'll understand computers better than ever before!

I think EndeavourOS (or anything based on Arch Linux) isn't a great distro to start with for a beginner, experienced users like to pretend that it's totally easy but it's really not, it generally relies more on the terminal and manual configuration than other easier distros

I agree with that other comment in this thread saying that a different distro would be a lot easier to learn, and I also agree with them about Fedora Kinoite being easy to understand as a new user (the distro I use is a variant of it), though I also understand that a lot of people here aren't fond of Fedora due to their connection to Red Hat, and Fedora's Atomic variants like that have some quirks that make them different from most other distros

I also agree that XFCE isn't a great choice of desktop environment, a big part of it being "lightweight" is because it lacks a lot of useful features that other DEs have, and if your PC can handle current Windows then you most likely will be fine with "heavier" DEs like KDE Plasma or GNOME, they still generally run better than Windows these days

I'd recommend trying KDE Plasma (Fedora Kinoite comes with it, but you can get it on most other distros too), it's very flexible but still pretty easy to use, its UI scaling works better than in any other DE I've seen, and it also has color blindness filters if that's what you mean by color filter (and if you mean blue light filter, it has that too)

If it's your first distro, just install Linux Mint, Kubuntu, Fedora, Debian... one of the "big ones".

EndeavourOS

EndeavourOS is based on Arch linux, which is marketed to "power users". EndeavourOS just has some decisions made for you plus some helpful tools. It is still Arch Linux under the hood and does require you to interact with the command line a lot.

One of the first things that I notice is that I can’t easily modify the /usr/ directory. I tried to install Java there but the OS would not let me because I lack the permission. How do I get the permission?

Linux, unlike Windows, is a multi-user system. That means multiple users can use the machine at the same time. You have your user account, but you also have an "Administrator" account. Did the installer ask you to set a "root password"? That is the password to the Administrator account, on Linux it's called "root".

Alternatives: https://kubuntu.org/
https://www.linuxmint.com/
https://pop.system76.com/
https://lubuntu.me/
https://fedoraproject.org/

I strongly suggest you give up on EndeavourOS (for now) and try one of the ones linked above. You also have to know nobody chooses a Linux distro forever. "Distro hopping" is a thing, people try many, sometimes dozens of Linuxes until they find one that suits them.

My first distro was RedHat back in 2004. Then Slackware, then Debian. Since then I've tried/used Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Linux From Scratch, Slax, Linux Mint (installed it for family members), Void Linux (what I use now), etc. etc.

Once you get a good feel for linux with one of the more user friendly distros, then you can try the exotic ones.

Books/wikis: https://linuxnewbieguide.org/ulngebook2017/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64

Arch and Gentoo wikis are distro-specific but hold a lot of info that applies to others.

Best place to find help with Linux is IRC.

• server: irc.libera.chat
• channels: #Linux, #Debian, and so on, the help channel is usually just your distros name.

The /usr/ folder is not to be touched directly. The system uses those folders to store configuration and installation files.
The /home/ folder is what you'll be using to access your files and documents. The rest is not to be touched unless you're doing "power user" stuff.

I'll be echoing @multitotal@lemmygrad.ml's suggestion and recommending that you install Linux Mint, which is recommended for early Linux users, though it doesn't matter that much in the end for the average user.

OK, couple things here. First... change how you view installing and uninstalling. 99% of what you want/need can be installed with pacman, which is like the windows store. If you are not keen on the cli/terminal use, open up a command prompt and run the command 'sudo pacman -S octopi' to install it. You can then launch the octopi app and install or uninstall apps from there. I recommend sticking to this for now until you get more comfortable with linux and the cli. You'll want to use octopi to download and install yay, which is another package manager like pacman but has more software available. Once you do that, enable AUR (arch user repository) in octopi so it knows to use yay as well as pacman when searching for software.

The calendar app you mentioned - you downloaded a 'tarball', which is essentially a compressed file for the app. If you searched for Orage and followed links to their source page, there's directions on how to install the tarball. This is common for linux apps. That being said, Orage is in the AUR so after getting g octopi setup you can install it from there.

The remove command you used is not for removing files, it's for uninstalling packages. So to uninstall noto fonts you would use the command 'sudo pacman -Rdd noto-fonts', however depending on the desktop 3nvironment (de) you selected it could cause issues. I don't really recommend removing the font since it's a dependency for KDE, XFCE, and maybe some others. Instead, find a replacement font you like and set it in the settings.

Regarding the dpi issue, does the problem persist after logout/login or a reboot? Sometimes dpi setting require that, again depending on the desktop environment.

XFCE is generally a pretty low spec requirement and hence less feature heavy desktop environment its good but i wouldnt use it on a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. I've never used endeavor OS tho. If you are looking for a windows like experience but without all the bullshit what id do is get Kubuntu, or Linux Mint Cinnamon. I find Cinnamon is a really good entry level desktop environment for people coming from windows (my elderly grandmother uses it and doesnt even know) so thats a good starter one for you probably, but KDE plasma is what Kubuntu has and itll be like the more feature rich customization heavy but still windowsy layout DE. Linux mint will also come with an app store you can use to install programs.

You can also try out just installing the DEs in your current OS but since your so new i hesitate to recommend that. I do think youll be much happier with something other than XFCE though.

Hey I have extensive experience and I think you need a basic tutorial are you willing to message me on matrix, discord, or telegram? I can get you up to speed, you did choose a terminal centric distro and I highly recommend as a beginner a switch to fedora kinoite, if you insist on staying on endeavor please send me a pm and I'll troubleshoot anything with you all you want, I'm very free

i promise it's not as confusing as this first experience makes it seem

xfce is kind of the linux equivalent of windows xp, it's super not modern... on purpose! it's designed to maximize performance

Hey, I am also recently learning to use Linux. I am definitely not a tech person at all. I went with Mint, as it's one of the typical generic recommendations for beginners. So far the learning process has been manageable. I can see that in the long term, I will probably eventually switch to something other than Mint, but I would say it was a good choice for me to learn on and in the short term I am going to keep learning on it as I've gotten it to satisfyingly do all of the basic stuff I needed. When I change to something else it will be because I want to go beyond that and start doing things in new (to me) ways.

I ended up asking a lot of questions to chat bots which actually helped me out a lot. I found that when I tried to search up issues or questions I was having (which was already hard, because I often didn't really even know what I am trying to ask or what words to use to ask it), a lot of the time I would find someone posting about the same issue, but a lot of the replies were just people telling them to just google it or calling OP lazy for asking. There's definitely many patient and helpful people too (like many of the people replying in this thread), but initially I still struggled a lot with comprehension of their help because I was so unfamiliar with even very basic computing terms. A lot of the material I find that is intended for beginners would be a bit demoralizing because, for my (quite) low level of tech knowledge, it felt a bit like this:

This is where chat bots were pretty helpful for making things more comprehensible. In addition to asking chat bots my basic questions, I also did a short command line tutorial (in my case, this one: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners) and I started watching a YouTube channel called Veronica Explains. I can see I have a lot of stuff I still need to learn but I feel I am past the first hurdles now. It was difficult and kind of intimidating and frustrating at first and I still run into frustrations but now I am more and more excited about what I'll eventually be able to do as I learn more.

waow (basedbasedbased)

I can't do it comrade, at least not straight away. I've moved my server and my laptop over to Linux, but my main desktop PC is still running Windows because I still believe my brain is too smooth to daily drive Linux.