It's not so much about being "smart" to figure it out, it's more like it needs to "click" with you. At first you'll think it's stupid, you'll think it's a tedious way to do things and configure your system. Then you'll do something and it'll suddenly be like "oooooh I get it now, oh man that's awesome!". That's NixOS.

It's not a distro I recommend to people, it's one you just have to play around with yourself to see if you like it or not. But I will say I've found that the majority of people who do switch to it, it's the last distro they use. Like I'll spend a week on something else every few months to try it but I always go back to NixOS now. I just can't use any other distro long term anymore.

Honestly I don't think nixos is harder than other advanced distros, its just very different. For instance I've used nixos for a while now but I've never been able to get a working arch install, even following the guide. I think in a lot of ways nixos is easier because to fix a problem you don't have to go digging through config files and esoteric shell commands, you usually just have to modify your config and rebuild. The biggest problem is that nix documentation is terrible. I would recommend trying it out in a low stakes environment like a vm using the graphical installer, then just poking around the config file and figuring out what stuff does. Also, as a replacement for good documentation there are some good guides online. I've been enjoying guides by tonybtw.com, his videos as well as vimjoyer and no boilerplate on youtube are great

I mean…

Oh I bet I can. I've managed to blackscreen it once already and when it rebooted, it showed up on the boot screen as plain Ubuntu instead of Mint. The main problem I have is it doesn't connect to the internet anymore. I had malware on the windoze ssd that kept disconnecting my internet (my uncle must have given me a dodgy windows with a legit key) but it can't spread onto Linux can it? They're on separate ssds.

Is there an even more noob friendly distro that even I can't mess up? I just want to be able to get it online again.

Mate, I didn't even install the Linux myself, I had to get my techie uncle to do it 😭😭😭 you think I know how to do any of the things you suggested? I was so proud of myself with my sudo! Apt! Upgrade!

And now I have no internet on my Linux 😭😭😭