You don't have to know. The Calamares installer annotates your partitions and explains what will happen in natural language. If you can order a pizza online, you can install Linux.
Yeah. If ordering a pizza also regularly involves entering BIOS setup to change boot device ordering, change SATA mode from RAID to AHCI and disable secure boot, depending on your distro.
This is funny. I have an HP PC that has an option in the BIOS to "prepare for RAID" or some such. I wondered what that was, so I turned it on. I had Linux on it at the time, and nothing happened. I shrugged and just forgot about it.
Fast forward a few months later, when I gave this PC to my dad. He installed Windows on it, then started thinking the PC was somehow borked: "the installer sees the drive, installs, reboots, then it fails to boot". I was shocked, that PC worked perfectly.
Then I remembered about that setting, told him to untick the box in the BIOS, and he was off to the races.
