I think so. I first gave it a shot back in 2004-2005 when linux wasn't very user friendly. It's much easier now. Linux mint is a good choice.
I had no idea how to use the command line, and for many things nowadays it isn't required. I started to learn by enabling features and fixing problems, usually by copying and pasting things from the internet and reading the manpages of everything. Slowly, I began to learn.
So you can use it without any knowledge of programming or anything, but you will almost always pick things up along the way. If you aren't afraid to learn, Arch linux is a good one to try as it politely forces you to learn how things work. It can be a lot of fun.
I say: give it a shot. Can't hurt (usually). I'd say the worst thing that's easy to do is to delete, format or repartition your hard drive, but that's easy to recover. Overwriting your hard drive is worse (take agessss to recover) but much harder to do by mistake.
Don't forget to try the -toram cheatcode to load the entire OS to memory (at which point you can remove the flash drive) To enable this, you go to the boot splash screen, and edit the option (usually you press "tab", but I added a dedicated "ram only" option to my list after a while to save time) at the very end of the (usually unnecessarily long) list of options and things add a space and "-toram" and see if it works. Go and make hot cocoa while it's reading the entire contents of the fashdrive into memory and then see what it's like.
