dpkg was interrupted you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to

I literally just installed Ubuntu 19.10 connected via PuTTY, and tried to do something very simple, and this error came up. I've literally run this code from the command line 20 or 30 times. It never finishes without errors, the most common being
I'm new to Ubuntu and don't know what to do next. What can I do to resolve this? I must say that I'm rapidly discovering that Ubuntu is vastly more difficult that Windows, to the point of being virtually impossible.