There's plenty to read up on but I think starting with any is a good place. You'll find stuff you dislike. I'd recommend setting up ventoy on a USB (it will let you have several linux images on one thumb drive) and testing out most importantly the desktop environment (DE).
Main ones being KDE, GNOME, and cinnamon that comes with Mint (which is a great first distro to test).
Not a 1 day read but reasonably short (I normally read it in about 2-3 days of non-dedicated reading) is the Scorpio races by Maggie stiefvater. It's a lovely read that focuses pretty heavily on the two man characters which is what draws me in every time.
I read this book 14 times one year in high school and I continue to read it once a year
Lots of support already but I made it switch in December last year and no regrets. There's a bit of a learning curve getting used to a new environment but the computer actually becomes a tool you can shape to your needs rather than changing how you work so your computer will do it.
I've been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
From my understanding, a lot of people appreciate the vibe. It's also designed in such a way that you kind of need to use different tools to complete different sections and you need to be methodical as compared to DS1/3 where you can get by blitzing past every enemy.
I think another issue I had was that once I cleared one branch, since you can do them in Sorta any order, you end up being over leveled IMO.
My issues with DS2 stem from the enemy spam, the low boss quality, the overall floatiness (slow HP regen even from estus, movement, etc), the areas don't feel like Anything special.
I think the vibe and the ideas behind the game are cool and I think to myself every once in awhile "maybe I should revisit the game" then I see a vid of gameplay and realize that's not for me lol.
The fact that the areas to visit are also just the branching paths from your hub also feels kinda bad. That said Majula is incredible and they Completely knocked that out of the park.
I did finish DS2 but gave up during the DLC since those areas are so unfun IMO.
I think it's a skippable entry if free time is a huge luxury but if you like dark souls this is Definitely still dark souls.
Pain to me is not really that important a metric. Figure out where you think it'll bring you the most joy. Most of mine are reasonably visible and I'm very glad for it. Tattoos are much less stigmatized than before.
As for durability, as long as you take good care of it while it heals and you wear sun screen after, most places other than hands and feet will likely do well. Less sun the better but that makes them hard to look at most of the time.
Awesome :) Feel free to shoot me a message when you get around to it. Love to hear about people's experience with the game