I use RSS Guard

I remember that feeling. And using a beginner friendly distro like Mint is a mixed bag, because while the simple stuff is easier, more complex things can be a bit more difficult than they might be on a system designed to be flexible, like Endeavour or Arch; it’s a compromise either way.

You nay have already done some of these, but the things that gave me the confidence to switch were:

• Learning how to use the terminal a bit, specifically, basic commands like ls, cd, pwd, cp, mv, cat, touch, and grep - even if you don’t need to use the terminal on whatever OS you’re on, this will give you confidence.
• Reading the docs on my package manager and learning how to use it properly so that I wasn’t following ancient tutorials on the internet blindly and breaking things.
• Deciding to only change things about my OS when necessary or when the change I’m making is officially supported by the team behind the OS (like moving to dracut on Endeavour).
• Learning that “everything is a file.” Poking around ~/.config and realizing that system config is all text files helped me feel empowered to fix issues that may arise.
• Setting up failsafes: BTRFS system snapshots with Timeshift on Endeavour, configured to show snapshots on the GRUB screen so that I can revert to a known working system at boot if I break something. I also cloned my Windows install and turned it into a VM so that I could access it at any time if I needed to.
• Embracing FLOSS alternatives. Instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and spending ages trying to get some specific piece of proprietary software working, realising that FLOSS projects are often designed on and for Linux and usually work much better there than they do on Windows or MacOS. I do design work professionally, so I figured out how to move my entire print design workflow to Scribus, Inkscape, and Krita, and although it took some learning, I’m much happier for it. Stick to software available in the package repos of your OS, or available as a Flatpak or AppImage, and find alternatives for everything else if at all possible. There is a near endless supply of high quality software for Linux and it’s a real shame to move to the OS and not take advantage of that.

At the end of the day I was still fairly petrified, but I found the experience much smoother than I had dared to hope. I think the deciding factor was that I used to really enjoy my computer way back in the Windows XP days through to Windows 7, but that joy had long since gone until I found it again with Linux. When using my computer began to feel like drudgery, I didn’t really have a choice but to switch.

Also, a hugely overlooked part of choosing a distro is the community around it. If your distro has good people filling its forums, you’ll never need to worry about getting something working when you need to.

What are you frightened of?

All good info, but OP should not be running Endeavour if they are trying to mess around in /usr/ to install java - they’re going to bork their install in a matter of minutes without constant supervision. Mint, PopOS, Fedora Kinoite, Elementary… whatever, but not an Arch based distro.

Seconding Mint, or a beginner distro that supports KDE Plasma for a more feature complete experience

Agreed: Endeavour is not for beginners.

What’s a beginner to do

Well that’s just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It’s not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don’t have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don’t want to.

So when you ask “am I supposed to X,” the answer is that there really isn’t a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you’re supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.

Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.

Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.

What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn’t supply any.

AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

If I’m not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their “Welcome” app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.

I got a “page doesn’t exist” error

Where’d you get this? I’m curious and would like to watch it.