They’ve let their site certificates expire a few times and told their users to set their clocks back to get around the issueand they’ve accidentally ddosed the aur a couple of times with their package management tools.
I started with Corel Linux, moved to Mandrake and then began an 18 year distro-hopping journey. To keep it interesting, I rolled a d100 on distrowatch.com and installed whatever I landed on. About 6 years ago I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed and haven’t hopped since if you don’t count a brief dalliance with endeavour on my laptop.
Yes you can but you often see the terminal used when helping people online. This is because it works across desktop environments and mostly across distros, however it does give the impression that the terminal is needed.