I’m a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don’t understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.
With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.
(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)
While I’m at it, I’d also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don’t worry about them immediately as it’s probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.