Thank you.
It's interesting to read about your practice and experiences. I was gravitating towards similar direction, but wanted to know how the others have done it. My infrequent meditation practice so far has been just mindfully observing breathing, so I felt unsure what to do with Flower Fresh.
It also felt surprisingly effective just to silently reapeat the verse once breathing in and out while I was listening to the audiobook.
I also recommend Linux Mint. It's been hands down the best experience of all the Linux distros I've tried.
The installation is done with a USB stick. In short, you download the Linux iso image and create a bootable USB stick with a software. In Windows I have always used Rufus for that.
The Linux installer gives you a choise to wipe everything and install Linux. Installing Mint has always been very straight forward.
I can't comment on hardware since I've only used Linux on +5 year old laptops. They seem to work fine.
There most likely will be many new things that can feel confusing in the beginning, but I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. There also are tons of good tutorials of everything.
Best of luck to your Linux project!