How can I create better YouTube videos?

Your format sounds relatively simple so I guess some of the main points would be:

• Take care of your audio equipment. figure out budgets and see what kind of microphone and other equipment you can afford. This video is starting to get dated but it's a good short introduction to different types of microphones. It goes off a little hard on USB mics like the Blue Yeti but if you're still exploring/not sure how far you're gonna go a USB mic is probably fine as a starting point.
• Take care of your recording. Bad audio can be the straw that breaks the camel's back for people trying out your stuff. NPR has a good list of common issues in audio recording play around a bit on your own and see what you can fix.
• Don't overdo it though, don't start filtering or mixing your audio in weird ways to make up for something, a good recording with little edits is always going to outshine a bad recording with lots of editing.
• Take care of your visuals. If you're going to film yourself talking a normal webcam is fine to start out with. What you might want to worry about is lighting, doing it poorly can make your look very bad. This is a pretty neat video about it, but be careful when looking through tutorials on this, especially ones focused on streaming or YouTube specifically. Lots of SEO shenanigans and people making money off of affiliates in there.
• Not overdoing it applies here too, don't immediately get an expensive beauty light to point at yourself and call it a day.
• If you're not filming yourself make sure you at least have some visuals going on, even if it's podcast format at least have a personalized still or spend a little bit of time finding something to underscore what is being said. Don't put in unrelated footage, that's probably the biggest tell in terms of amateurism. You could even use the presenter view of most conference apps to present visuals while you're talking. But that's up to you.

For all of these things pretty similar precautions apply: don't overdo it, start small, improve incrementally. Try and find sources and guides speaking from professional experience and are geared towards increasing your understanding and helping you be better at recording, avoid the ones that immediately try and sell your products or are worded as 'hacks' to increase viewership. (but you probably knew that).

There are very few videos I watch that are not edited to make specific points. TED talks come to mind, but those are planned and rehearsed presentations. For a conversation like you are mentioning, editing out irrelevant and awkward parts will make it more enjoyable to watch.

One of the podcasts I listen too mentioned that they both record locally on good equipment and then one of them combines the files and makes the edits. That would be the ideal situation. To start you should at least make edits to your recording to improve the flow.

I've never done this so I may be completely mistaken.

I haven't watched them, but the guy behind Game Maker's Toolkit recently released a series of videos called "How to Edit a Video Essay" (they were previously for his Patreon patrons only). They might have some good advice for you.

I think the videos are unlisted, so you have to get to them through this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc38fcMFcV_vkxRSCN3zLlOGzNVAlEydG

Some smaller advice regarding the content itself:

If you plan to showcase lots of linux distributions, instead of installing the distro to show it off you can use https://distrotest.net/, which is pretty solid.

Sometimes it is nice to be a bit silly in a video, so if it's you and a few friends you could joke around a bit. Have it be natural, not staged.

Respect your viewer's time.

Typical podcast format doesn't get many views (if you even care) over a scripted video.

Due to the nature of a live conversation between different people there will be extra overhead for exchanging information between persons, which will result on longer run time. Retention rate goes down the longer the video is.

You can control how your audio sounds, but less so for others. So do some audio testing.

So if you insist on keeping this a podcast format (which I'd recommended against.):

• Rehearsal important information beforehand.
• Provide a table of content to the timestamp of each topic discussed.
• Allocating time budgets for each section and keep in mind of the call runtime.

Good luck