Ubuntu’s not bad, though watch for out of date info when you look things up. It’s been around a long time.

One of the most useful things I’ve heard is that while there are a lot of little niche distros, it comes mostly down to three main types: Debian based, Fedora based, and Arch based. This crosses with the most popular desktop environments: KDE Plasma, LXQt, GNOME, XFCE. There are other options but it’s easier to not have to learn two things at once.

The desktop environment is the front end ‘look’n’feel’ of the system. Look at some screenshots to get the look. Some are more easily customizable/prettier (KDE more windows-y, GNOME more Mac-y) and some are lighter on resources if that’s a worry. (XFCE/LXQt)

The three main swaths of distros are more about the back end. Debian tends to be more stable, but not bleeding edge, so it might not handle hardware that just came out but is a bit less likely to break. Arch tends to be on the bleeding edge, with a lot of capabilities, but can give you some ‘learning experiences’ you might not be looking for. Fedora is in the middle.

Almost anything you can do on one, you can do on the others, so don’t worry too much about exclusives. It’s more about what comes as pre-installed conveniences/bloatware. (e.g. steam and lutris on gaming distros, networking tools as on Kaisen or Kali, or a kernel tweaked for lower latency audio in Ubuntu Studio meant for music production)

And the best part is you can try a whole bunch of them very easily if you have a spare good-sized thumb drive laying around. Ventoy is a tool for booting multiple systems from a single USB. Most major distros offer a ‘live usb’ file. Set up a ventoy USB drive. Download the ISOs for any distros that look cool, and then boot from the USB to try out any that interest you without even needing to do anything to your existing windows install.