New Laptop with modern LL? NO man!

[Moltke]

I did not know that Linux was an OS kernel and NOT an OS.

Linux is an OS "just like" Windows and MAC OS. Yes, they all use different approaches but deep down they all rely on the kernel for the same purposes; they all consist of a user mode and a kernel mode. The main differences are libraries; Windows use mainly DLLs(dynamic-link library) while Linux uses .SOs(shared object) MAC OS uses DYLIBs(dynamic library). You can find out more on these links:
https://techterms.com/definition/dll
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Library...namic.html
https://fileinfo.com/extension/dylib
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectu...Windows_NT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_...ng_systems

LL you have to struggle and figure out what program does what and how it benefits you

And when you use or used to Windows, you didn't do this? I did. The thing's with Linux you have more info about that program; you can even modify it to your taste/need as long as you have the knowledge of course, while in Windows you only have to click and run xy soft without even care to know what it does; you assume the program will do what it is supposed to, but sometimes this is not the case and there's when issues arise. Let's take CCleaner for example, most people assume it cleans and optimizes their pc, but how exactly? What is the measure for it to happen? Truth is I never really saw much difference when using it than when I didn't. On the other hand, Linux doesn't need a CCleaner like software, yes, there's bleachbit and and a few others, in LL you have Lite Tweaks, which is great by the way, but all you need to do is to clean/delete your  web browser history once a while as per your needs and/or open a terminal and type

Code:

$ sudo apt autoremove

  which is used to remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no longer needed as dependencies changed or the package(s) needing them  were removed in the meantime. With these two steps you're peforming a basic maintenance routine without needing any third software to do it for you, and the best part is that you have control over what happens and why. Luckily for us we're LL users so there's Lite Tweaks which will do all of that for us . I recommend reading man pages since there's plenty of info about your system and its installed programs and how to use them. You can start by reading these ones:
man apt, man apt-get, man apt cache, man aptitude, man systemd, man dpkg, man man...and do man pkg where pkg is the name of the program you want to know more about i.e man nano, man firefox, man vcl...also, you might want to know a little more about your system, explore it by "lsing" across directories from the terminal and just check each directory contents

Code:

$ ls /usr/bin

you'll see lots and lots of files and folders here.

Code:

$ ls /usr/lib

where Linux's precious libraries are kept. Don't worry you'll make no harm by typing these commands, you're only listing directories' contents, feel free to try some others. 

Cheers!