The good thing is that most distributions have live images that you can basically put on a USB stick and run without installing anything. It won't give you quite the same experience as an installed instance but will at least let you play around with things (especially Gnome or KDE etc.)
They are not likely to be using the terminal. Pretty much every graphical file browser will ask for confirmation upon delete, and many will use a rubbish bin by default.
Before I had a proper internet connection (had to ask permission to borrow a dial up account) I bought a magazine that had a picture of a cow on it saying that Larry the cow was different. It was a DVD image of the stage one mirror of this new fangled Gentoo thing.
Learnt from the magazine how to install a bootloader and so on and then "bravely" typed emerge world into the terminal after configuring the list of all the packages I wanted. Including a full desktop (KDE I think but may have been Gnome). And Firefox. And Open Office. And some multimedia stuff I don't remember.
You can also play with it in a virtual machine. It won't give you quite the same experience for your specific hardware, but you will get a feel for how it works, especially the package manager etc.
Beryl was a fork of Compiz, and then was merged back later on. The desktop cube was basically Compiz' first big show off feature, along with the wobbly windows.
Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags... Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn't do that again.
I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.
Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.
Took me a few goes here and there but now I love my minimal tiling setup. Never really got it but just played with them here and there out of curiosity. Last time I tried it something clicked for me and now I've no desire to go back.
Could you try it on Wayland? It would likely use xwayland anyway but maybe it gets the geometry reported differently and scales differently? Or even try the Valve compositor to rescale things? Thinking it loud as I've not tried them at all for something like this but maybe worth looking into.
Arch user here (by the way). I agree - ignore us.