Bitcoin mining to me is just like a way to acquire the coins at discount while having few other risks though as i do believe in its future value, mining seems to be more risk averse approach that looks more suitable to me personally and that always brings cash generating revenues rather than just buy and hold passively...
Imho mixing up minig and holding is a mistake to be avoided. They're different things and even if you may do both, it's good to do the math separately.
This being said, you'll have to make sure the mining you (would) do is profitable (counted like you would sell immediately all the coins you mine). And this usually means extremely cheap electricity. And since you didn't state what's the price for you, we don't know if you should start mining at all or not.
Holding is clearly much easier, basically all you need is a safe wallet (preferably hardware wallet or - if you are tech savvy - cold storage). Of course, you need a strong hearth too, to handle the big price fluctuations.
About price and difficulty... it's hard to tell.. sometimes price follows the difficulty, sometimes the difficulty has to follow the price. For example I remember the crypto winter in 2015-2016 when many miners gave up. such events happen rather rarely, but they did happen.
So have to do the math and see for yourself, really, what would be the best course of action.
PS. Since you've asked about OS there may be a chance that you were thinking on mining with GPUs and such. That mines altcoins, which you may or may not convert (automatically or not) into bitcoin. And if you go on that path, you should ask on the altcoin mining section of the forum. Here - in bitcoin mining - ASICs are used.
