My understanding is that the lithium itself isn’t the issue, it’s that lithium batteries require other rare earths like cobalt where as sodium itself is not only more common than lithium, but it uses more common material like iron or tin in its battery chemistry that are also less problematic.

Honestly the popular linux distros are pretty polished / user friendly these days. You’ll run into little issues, and you need to be at least a little bit curious / tech savvy to figure them out, but it’s nothing a little googling can’t solve typically.