Linux

I started with Zoro which is a windows look alike, tried mint and a few other distros but ultimately landed on Fedora.

Fedora has been great and I haven't been tempted to leave since trying it out a few years ago.

Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.

What's your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we'll need a broader chat.

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don't recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)

Feel free to dive in, the water is lovely.

I had several drives in my PC, so I wiped a small one and just installed a few different distros and figured out what I liked. I ended up sticking with nobara with KDE.

I use Nobara which comes with drivers for Nvidia and stuff just works. It's very noob friendly.

Honestly, I recommend everyone without existing Linux experience to use Fedora: it's reasonable modern (nice for, e.g. gaming), while also not being a full rolling release model like Arch (which needs expertise to fix in case something breaks). It's also reasonably popular, meaning you will find enough guidance in case something does break.

https://neon.kde.org/

KDE is the best desktop environment, period. Why not go with a stable OS base but enjoy all the current updates of your desktop, app suite? Introduction: KDE Neon

Archcraft and Arco.

1. It doesn't really matter much which distro you choose.
2. Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won't matter anymore.
3. There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
4. Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it's not published yet. With distrobox there's no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
5. Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can't fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
6. Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.

Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.

Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type !aw KDE into ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.

Watch great channels like "the linux experiment" on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it's on peertube?

Use Archlinux. Reason ? Because you will be able to say " I use Arch btw".

Btw, I use Arch.