welp, I still need to add myself to the sudo group and sudoers file, and that's something I need a root shell for. (unless I always miss some options during setup to make my user automatically a sudoer)
You did. If you leave your root password blank it'll automatically add the user account you create in the following step to sudo and disable the root account.
If you want to have both a root account and a user account with sudo, you'll have to do that manually, but that's a pretty unusual setup.
Yeah, general practice is to either elevate privelige by switching accounts, or by using sudo. Having both just increases your attack surface to no practical benefit (especially since you can technically still switch to a root account with "sudo - i" even if you're going the sudo route).
I used mostly Windows systems primarily and I guess I just adapted that habit of having an Administrator account for when shit goes down, and my own user account that has admin rights.
It's just convenient. I liked my Administrator account as clean as possible, and I do the same in Linux with root. There is its time and place where I need root.
But you are right, I should change my habits. I'm not even sure how sudo and rights and environments and sessions and god knows what works exactly behind the scenes, so probably, maybe, there are technical differences too in the way I use these and the way how I should... I don't know.
To install the current version of Windows on my PC, I need to enter command prompt from within the installer and type 2 commands to disable ethernet and the online install requirement.
Otherwise it won't let me install it without a Microsoft account.
Almost all major desktop Linux distros let you install them with "Click Next until Done" now.
When my mom needed a new PC, she asked me, the family's computer guy. I asked her what she does on her PC, bought one, installed Debian with Cinnamon, activated automatic security updates without notifications, set up her printer and an ssh/vnc server for remote assistance. I haven't heard of any issues in 2 years.