FrostKing

for context: I have an Asrock b450m/ac R2.0 MoBo (that seems to matter), and I'm running Nobara Linux. I was using OpenRGB to control some rgb fans and it was working fine, although I couldn't control the individual LEDs. Then suddenly (Can't think of anything I did that would've messed it up, other than maybe going from the 'effects' tab (from the plugin) to the default one, and clicking apply color, that's when it happened) it stopped recognizing my devices. I read online that I needed to run it as sudo, but when I do, I get this error

Attempting to connect to local OpenRGB server.
Connection attempt failed
Local OpenRGB server unavailable.
Running standalone.
[i2c_smbus_linux] Failed to read i2c device PCI device ID
QStandardPaths: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set, defaulting to '/tmp/runtime-root'
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc
Aborted

From looking online it seemed to be the SMBus access problem mentioned in the OpenRGB Docs, and so I tried following these steps, but honestly I think I'm too new to really understand how to do it right. It felt like things kept going wrong during the patching of the kernel part, up until the last line, which simply didn't work.

As a Linux noob, I would super appreciate very noob friendly responses. Any help would be really appreciated.

I've used Windows my whole life, except for a 2006 Mac OS X I got when I was a kid, and I never thought about switching away from it. However, in recent times, I've grown to care more about FOSS and customizability, and I'm also a bit more tech-savvy than the average person, I'd say. As such, I've of course heard of Linux, and didn't realize how simple it was to install certain distros until my brother installed Linux Mint on an old laptop he repaired. I want to play around with it and see if it's something I'd be interested in, but at the moment I only have one computer, which is my laptop, and I don't think it'd be a good idea to do a full switch over when all my important stuff is on here. As such, I've heard people talk about "dual booting" which from what I understand means having both Windows and Linux on the computer, and picking which to use on start up? This sounds like a perfect environment to play around with Linux, assign it like 50GB of space (Is that enough?) and see if I like it, but I'm very ignorant about a lot of things related to Linux, and don't want to start playing around with something I don't understand. Advice would be appreciated.

Sadly there's a few too many replies for my busy self to respond to. I'll say thanks for the help though, I appreciate it!