you should tell him to always use the "store" for a given distro rather than googling, that's a bad idea and you can end up with malware or breaking your config. Much better to use pacman/apt/pkg/etc if you go through the command line to install. Installing bare .deb/.rpm is a really bad idea unless you are well versed on the distro and it's packaging system. I understand the pain points of stores but they are still far better than googling for it. Pop OS actually has a nice store and bug free as of the latest revision. All my version upgrades have gone well too. The only real issue I had was trying multiple desktops. If you switch from say Gnome/KDE/XFCE it is a good idea to reboot between as they do weird things to dbus and don't plan around having multiple login types going on.