
Wyll is the least immediately unlikeable but he’s boring and I hated talking to him
Laezel, shadow - clearly intended to parallel each other but listening to hard-headed morons clash between “we should murder everything” and “those people need medicine and my only medicine is pain” is not entertaining to me. Their “growth” doesn’t ever seem to fix this
Karlach I don’t have real complaints about
Gale never managed to grow out of being pompous and annoying
Dark urge probably the best character
There’s plenty of listicles and reddit posts with other complaints if you google “don’t like bg3 characters”.

Depends on how much you care about security. Some distros are still very focused on “I operate my desktop in my locked house and don’t expect police to knock” use cases. If you’re chill with typing in a disk encryption password on boot you can turn that on, but getting a seamless secure boot+tpm decrypt is pretty challenging.
And then if that is what you want, people will of course happily tell you what a stupid insecure idea that is because Intel or Microsoft or something.
To answer your question broadly: I found arch/endeavor to be easier to secure and have a single set of solid instructions. OpenSuse and fedora both had multiple mediocre and deeply iffy sets of instructions, but for basic setup and use they are easier to use. OpenSuse bricked several times, fedora was far far far more stable for me but you’ll hear countless people with the opposite story. I don’t care for Ubuntu.
The bigger impact past setup is the desktop environment. You pick gnome (Ubuntu, fedora, endeavor) if you hate yourself and think some random dev 5000 miles away can make decisions for you better than you can. You pick KDE (fedora, suse, endeavor) if you want a nice windowsesque experience. You pick cosmic (popos, derived from Ubuntu) if you want to try something new that might suck. There are others but they are mostly if you want a super cut down experience.
People have recommended mint for new users for at least a decade or so. Please just don’t. It’s super out of date.
Oh sorry gale I was using those magical socks
Maybe you should go find your own magical shit rather than asking stupid questions.