Just chill out and talk. If you don't get stuff, ask. Decent people will explain stuff to you, especially if they know you legitimately struggle with it.
I might actually, I have someone dropping by a spare laptop they don't want in a few weeks and I was going to toss xubuntu on it kind of by default, but maybe not.
Yup. He wasn't very attractive (but not ugly either), but was very good at talking to people. Manipulating them and playing them off on one another, delivering just the right amount of praise or scorn at the right time. Complete narcissistic asshole if you knew him well. Not to mention really racist.
OpenRouter has some decently powerful free-to-use models, but I'm afraid as far as LLMs go 'free', 'good', and 'private' are going to be pretty mutually exclusive if you can't run one locally.
I've had some trouble with PDFs that were just images of pages of text (easy way to tell, assuming you're on linux, is run pdftotext on it and see if you get anything). There's a utility called pdfsandwich that will use Tesseract to OCR the images and add text to the PDF.
More Culture books by Banks, more Discworld by Pratchett...