technology

My suggestion is to start with the KDE version of Fedora. It supports a pretty huge amount of hardware, so odds are good that your wireless NIC (and other hardware) are likely to work right out of the box. The installation flashdrive doubles as a live working system that boots off the USB stick, so you could test out your hardware to see if it all works without actually removing Windows yet.

The KDE settings GUI is good enough that you likely won't need to worry about commandline stuff for awhile. KDE has a default layout similar to Windows. By default the "start" button is in the bottom left, and like Windows that gives you the shortcuts to settings, programs, folders, etc. Tray in the bottom right. Open programs and pinned programs on the bottom between them.

The non-KDE versions of Fedora are all the same under the hood, but have very different GUIs on top. The GNOME fans may pillory me but I've found it's a lot easier to teach Windows users how to use KDE than GNOME. KDE is also extremely stable and resource-efficient.

Something has gone awry if you are using git pulls to get basic wifi. I rarely rarely ever need to do that kind of thing, usually only if I'm fucking around, never for something as essential as networking. I'm curious how you ended up going down that path. Is it a very weird NIC? what distro are you going with?

I would suggest trying a different distro. Just boot it up from the USB and see if you can find one that works with your wireless and other essentials by default without any wrangling. Some computers are just more compatible with certain distros. The wizards will tell you it's not true because the linux kernel is the same... but it's the path of least resistance.

Whichever of the following you haven't tried, go for the next in the list: Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu.

You can use a utility called Ventoy to create a bootable USB with a selection of OSes/distros so you don't have to reflash all the time or have a zillion USB sticks. I have a couple dozen linuxes + Windows on my ventoy USB. It also lets you have a persistent file storage partition on the same USB which is VERY handy to keep documentation, notes about what you did, etc.

In terms of remembering, that the way you learn command line stuff is by repetition. The stuff you use, you will eventually recall. Stuff you don't use, you don't need to recall. You just look it up when you need it. Like you don't really need to remember the commands to fix your wifi because ideally you'll only do it once. (It's worthwhile to keep a note of what works in a safe place though in case of reinstallation.) And you will probably just be following a guide from online anyway. It's good to be able to read the commands so you can tell if they are OK to run but you don't need to make them up from scratch.

There is a utility called tldr it is on my top 5 things I always, always install right away on a new system. I would never have become comfortable on the command line without it. It is a very abbreviated in-terminal help system that gives a small number (5-10) of clear, useful examples for a given command. Use use it like this: tldr ls which gives you an idea of how to use the ls command. This would be the output. You can always go to man ls for comprehensive information, but you won't need to very often. Unless you end up liking the command line as I was eventually forced to.

The other way to remember stuff is also not to remember it but to make use of the shell history. That's a bit more complicated to explain and how it works by default varies by distro. On most systems you should be able to scroll with the up arrow or possibly page up at the empty prompt. You can also usually start typing and hit [tab] for auto complete. Some obtuse systems have these disabled by default. But there are very sophisticated systems/utilities for managing and navigating the shell history. By which I mean to explain that this is actually how people who live in the command line manage to "remember" things. They don't remember them... they just have a good way to access all previous commands which serve as mnemonics.

All this to say don't get down, it's a learning curve but it's doable. I'm not particularly well suited to this kind of thing. Learning it was a real struggle at times but even I manage. You feel like you aren't getting anywhere but you know more now than you did 24 hours ago.

I was trying to pull drivers for a particular cheap wireless NIC I had lying around and gave up after like six hours of trying to understand how to pull something from git.

Is it a git repo on the internet? If so, literally just type

git clone URL-HERE

e.g. to clone the Linux kernel,

git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git