Hello there - I had noted that, in the Q&A attached to the installing Blender video, the advice from the Udemy bods was that working with 2.77 was preferable to working with later iterations. This is because even small differences in the interface etc could require extra research to resolve possible clashes between what was on the video to what was in the interface in later editions. Makes perfect sense. Finding the 2.77 edition took me to the official download archive for 2.77. There are Mac and Windows installation files - if, like me, you prefer Linux, then there are also tarballs of 2.77 for differing architectures. I chose the i686 version and unzipped it into a folder in my home directory. It’s for single use, so I’m happy to have it there. Then I edited the blender.desktop file. All that was required was to include the full path to the executable - In my case:
Exec=/home/lari/Downloads/Blender/blender %f
Then I copied and pasted the blender.desktop file I had just edited to my Desktop where it created the launcher all by itself.
Hope this makes things a little easier for people.