📚 I do not find the Linux ecosystem particularly discoverable. How to I combat this?

I had vanilla Ubuntu for ages. It worked fine. Then I started coming across videos by Distro Tube, ThePrimeagen, Brodie Robertson, Linux experiment and more, and the ecosystem opens up to me.

I tried AwesomeWM, am currently driving LeftWM, I switched from Bash in Gnome Terminal to Fish in Alacritty, I installed Thunar, and a few more. I think much of these changes suit me better than vanilla Ubuntu.

However, it has left me somewhat worried as well. I discovered these programs through YouTube. Deeper than that, I discovered that there were issues at all with my original setup. I see that things are better now, but I never stopped to notice it was bad in the first place.

So I never thought to look for tiling window managers, because I was desensitized to the floating Gnome window manager. I was doing mostly fine with Bash in GTerm, and didn't think much of it. I didn't realize that these programs had problems that could be solved before I saw videos praising the solutions.

Is there a good way to discover this kind of minor everyday friction and check if ready-made solutions exist? Or is it mostly about having lots of feelers out and wait for word of mouth of some new software to reach you before you start to ask whether it actually solves a problem for you?