Need some help with a 2017 MacBook Air

Ok so I got a 2017 MacBook Air off somone I know cheap. I’ve never had a Mac but I need to learn Mac OS so I can work on a few computers at work when issues come up.

Here’s the deal. This thing is sluggish. I know it’s not gonna be like crazy fast but it was kinda rough. So I figured I’d do a fresh install. I updated as far as I could on the os. Did some reading and found out I can push sequoia. I know it’s not supported. Well the install bugged and I had already erased the drive when I was doing the install.

Tried internet recovery no good. High sierra has a bug and you have to edit the nvram to be able to access the recovery server. Found this out while I was actually doing internet recovery on the original os. Which went fine untill it got down to a min left. Well it hung there for over and hr. So I tried again this time hung for a hr and a half. I’ve also tried this with mac monterey. Latest supported os.

So at this point I’m like fuck it. Something’s wrong with the actual drive. So I tried to do an install of Linux. Well no issues there other then it took about a hr to install Ubuntu with updates. Which is weird cause I have a shitty Hp stream someone gave me and I can do an install on it in under 30min for sure. Checked the drive health after doing the install and ubuntu said its fine.

With all that said. I have plenty of experience with computer and oses. Just not really any experience with Mac’s. So I’d like yalls thoughts. I’m sure yall have had to do plenty of reinstalls and deal with failing drives on Macs. Does this sound like a failing drive? Anytime I’ve had a drive fail it just gives up the ghost and never works again. Does it just take a ridiculous amount of time to do a Mac OS install? So I honestly don’t know at this point but I’d like y’all’s advice.

Side note. I can get a plug and play drive from owc for a 100 bucks if it’s the drive. So that’s not to bad. It does say I need to have installed os 10 or later for it to have the newer firmware on it so it till detect the drive. That shouldn’t be an issue tho cause I was on 12.something. Unless trying to downgrade the os reverts the firmware.