Every other forum has rules about these posts because there’s such a glut of them, and yes, I could go read a stickied thread elsewhere, but here I am not doing that.
How would someone with no computer skills get acquainted with the OS? What version would you recommend to the hopeless novice? Can I keep windows on my PC and run the new OS or a practice version of it in a partitioned space while I learn? Can someone with minimal skills/time/patience be happy with a unix-like OS?
I feel like your just not using the proprietary drivers on amd it matters less but I hear the free Nvidia ones are not the best. See if your friend can help you install them or if you go it alone take a backup so you can restore it if you need without getting your hands dirty with the commandline.
https://help.zorin.com/docs/hardware/activate-nvidia-drivers/ https://help.zorin.com/docs/hardware/activate-amd-radeon-drivers/
It looks like the zorin process for doing it is pretty straightforward. I get better performance on my amd system using the propitiatory drivers than on Windows. Desktop Linux has moved forward pretty quickly.