apt search KEYWORD
Or
dnf search KEYWORD
Or
pacman -Ss KEYWORD
apt search KEYWORD
Or
dnf search KEYWORD
Or
pacman -Ss KEYWORD
You don’t even need any hardware to get started. Fire up a virtual machine in VirtualBox or VMWare or use WSL. Start playing around, find a distro/DE you like and start learning.
After some time, look into dual booting your existing machine. You can try this in a virtual machine first before making any changes to you hardware.
I ran Lineage on my OnePlus 5 for a few years until I replaced it with a Pixel 8 last month. The first thing I did with it was install GrapheneOS. I have not had any issues so far.
Cyanogenmod became LineageOS. It can be run fully de-googled or with Gapps.
GrapheneOS is also worth looking at.
Both run on modern hardware and are super simple to install.
Do you have an earlier snapshot that you can roll back to? If not then this is a learning experience about how you should take a snapshot before doing any configuration changes/updates. And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly).
As far as recovering files, you could try the Windows recovery environment (or whatever they call it). Take a snapshot first, in case it makes things worse.
You could also try mounting the virtual disk to your host system. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mount-qcow2-image
Or try booting the VM with a live boot environment of your favorite distro, similar to how you would do recovery from a dead physical machine.
Does this mean Linux phones might finally be on the horizon? I know Pine64 has existed for a couple of years, but the software is still not in a useable state.
Its more of a visibility thing. Backing out, your vehicle has to be three quarters of the way into traffic before you can really see.
There are, and always has been, waterproof devices with replaceable batteries. Phone manufacturers love that they can lie and say that a removable battery affects waterproofing. By making the battery hard to remove, and some other tricks, they make the phone less repairable. They then can convince consumers that they need to replace their phone every 18-24 months.
The only reason to replace your phone every two years is that you want the new shiny. All other reasons are artificial, marketing garbage created by manufactures who profit off of creating e-waste.
That indeed looks like an M.2
What is so infuriating about that?