Agree. We are posting in a nuance-free zone. Gotta go, I can only hold my breath at this many downvotes for so long, I just swam down to add my upvote.
When you can play songs and your rhythm is confident.
If you're looking at this from just starting out, you need less than you think. If anything, it is easier in a band, because you can rely on other people to hold the thing together, if you take a momentary breather. I spent years mentally flagellating myself because I couldn't play a lot of Grateful Dead tunes the way you hear them on record, and it should have been obvious but was not that that is because there's two guitar players. A lot of Garcia's lead bits would sound weird and not quite musical, without Bobby under there keeping the rhythm going.
Mostly depends what music you wanna play, but in nearly every genre there are the complementary talents of leads/shredding and chords/rhythm. Ideally you have both, but the band sounds best if everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing in the song. If you like Blues, find another Blues player, and get together to jam, in which you pick a riff/progression, and trade off between soloing and rhythm/chords. Middle step between a full band.
I have a Godin with HSH - it still quacks, but not like a real strat. Coil tapping can get you there, with the right pickups.
The best Strat I ever had was wired with a Dimarzio HS-3 in the bridge, which is a stacked humbucker famously used by Yngwie, and two stock Strat pups - using a Superswitch I was able to make it extremely quiet, while always having two single coils in the notch positions. I was even able to add the HS3's silent coil to the neck pickup, which wasn't quite like a normal neck, but pretty close with no buzz.
Learn a lot of Bluegrass songs and you'll get a feel for what chords go together - Bluegrass does not tend to use a lot of Jazz chords, but you will need a capo.
Look at the white keys on a piano, starting at C (white key next to the two black keys rather than three). The intervals between those white keys are TTSTTTS (tones and semitones). If you play C-E-G, you get a Cmajor chord. Now, if you take those three fingers and work your way up the keys, always skipping one key, the chords you will get are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim, and back to C.
If you start at any note on the keyboard, and figure out the TTSTTTS pattern from there (G is an easy one, the notes of the G Diatonic Scale are G-A-B-C-D-E-F# and back to G - the farther away you get from C in the circle of fifths, the more Flats or Sharps (Accidentals) will be in the scale),
Anyways, you can follow that same pattern and you'll that same sequence of Maj-Min-Min-Maj-Maj-Min-Dim, which are called Diatonic Chords. Basically, all these chords fit together beautifully with each other, in various combinations, with the most common set being the I-IV-V, which in C corresponds to C, F and G - the roman numerals refer to the chord you find at a given step in the diatonic chord scale. So for the G scale, your chords would be G-Am-Bm-C-D-Em-F#dim.
But there are all kinds of ways to mess with that basic harmonious formula, that I will not get into here, but find yourself a good theory course and go all the way through it. But mostly, learn those Bluegrass classics, and realize just how many are mostly I-IV-Vs with some tricky little bits thrown in here and there - it's not Jazz and never tries to be, though there is virtuosity everywhere.
I'm probably repeating what others are saying, but you, friend, are the people who will bring Linux to the world, not us nerds. Your post reflects that you haven't learned a few things you're definitely gonna learn, but you are on the right track, like a bloodhound (ie. a thinking person) with a strong scent (something is rotten in silicon valley).
First off, you don't have to deal with the command line at all, 99% of the time, even on Arch. But Arch is not your only nor your best choice, if that is a specific thing that worries you. Being on the bleeding edge is not what you think - you will get up-to-date GPU drivers on any decent distro, but Arch's approach means you will have more instances of your graphical desktop breaking in various and weird ways, necessitating a trip to the console on the regular.
Me in particular giving you advice: you should install Debian, because it aims for stability as its primary virtue, sacrificing speed of package updates to get that - they make sure that everything that is being updated continues to work flawlessly together, before it arrives in the regular release cycle. I run it because it never breaks, and if you use the KDE Plasma Desktop you get a full-featured OS that will work the same way other KDE desktops on other distros work. You can even look into Debian Sid, which is their "rolling release" version that tracks pretty closely with Arch's package updates.
Only caveat with Debian: by default, it will install the Gnome desktop, and you need to select KDE Plasma when you get to a screen where you select your Desktop Environment (DE) during the install process. You can uncheck "Debian Desktop Environment" and "Gnome" which are both selected by default, but you can select which DE you want to use at the login screen, so it won't hurt you to leave Gnome installed as well - it is more Mac-like and has strong opinions about things like what colour you should be able to use as your desktop background, so I'm not a fan, but I do like their general approach. But KDE Plasma is the one that feels very much like Windows. Others do as well, there are some distros that are actually tooled to look exactly like various Windoze versions.
Others will recommend Linux Mint, and while I used to have reservations based on their lack of work on Wayland support, they seem to be catching up there, and as much as the devs will tell you Wayland is coming no matter what (and unlike the AI slopmerchants, they are correct), but it's not ready today for quite a lot of things, so it's not something you need to worry about. Even if you didn't understand this paragraph, don't let it get you bunghed up in your head.
Even if you are certain you're gonna want the up-to-date version of some software, you can still do that on Debian, one way or another - Steam, for instance, I don't remember what I did when installing it, but it was effortless and I have the same Steam as anyone, far as I know. I certainly have no problem playing my games.
You will be doing stuff in the console no matter what, but vanilla Arch is basically S&M for people who love that kind of pain, and could well put you off of the GNU/Linux OS entirely if being dragged through that slog is not your thing. There are also distros that use Arch as the underlying base, much as Ubuntu and many, many other distros use Debian as the base of theirs.
The very first time I debated a christian about this, in 1992, I asked them what about back alley abortions, and he said he would charge all concerned, the conceivers and the abortionists, with murder.
They've been telling us the whole time this was their ultimate intention.
8 bit kid here, I played with my uncle's Atari VCS, the original one with six silver switches on the front, and my first computer was a C64.
It is definitely true that the only real difference between games released in the last ten years and games released in the 90s is prettier graphics. We still play platformers.
We don't need all this to have fun. Trust me.
Also it will implode and all of this will be available at fire sale prices.
Canadian here. Usians: make sure everyone you know understands that this is no joke. I live rural, I'm a socialist pinko but I live surrounded by rednecks, and we have conversations about insurgency on the regular. We have many, many Ukrainian refugees here.
I also didn't know what it was when I discovered their forum, which is a combination of kool-aid addled VCbrains and tech geeks having normal, informed conversations about tech stuff. I was hanging out there for a while, until I realized.
It's worse for GenX, we watched Fat Albert and learned about things like drugs and prejudice from it. The Cosby Show happened during my cynical, anti-wholesomeness teen years so I didn't watch that so much.
Agree. We are posting in a nuance-free zone. Gotta go, I can only hold my breath at this many downvotes for so long, I just swam down to add my upvote.