Some things in my mind:

• Use an easy to use distro with the software you want it to run (the software that sometimes isn't in your distro repositories and you may need to take some more advanced steps to use) and good documentation, ubuntu based distros like mint or arch based distros like cachyos (in my opinion, cachyos is the new best distro for beginners, as it has the best software library, configs, documentation (their specific documentation on the website together with the arch wiki) and gaming packages)
• For your desktop environment, choose on what you are accostumed to and on what you want to do with it, Gnome is very polished and has good touch features that are missing in every other DE, KDE is very desktop centric and can be tuned (should be tuned sometimes, like with numlock when starting the pc), etc
• For games, steam, heroic game launcher and lutris are very good suggestions, each has its use case. A local wine prefix with all the windows configs (vcredist and .net runtimes) and dxvk, and vkd3d-proton, are good to have, sometimes you want to play some games that aren't on the official stores. Always check protondb for compatibility and solutions
• For photoshop, you can pirate it (there are some github repos and youtube videos showing how to do it, but it has some bugs), or you can replace it, like with photogimp (interface changes, extra filters, etc) for gimp, krita, blender, etc, for video editing, there's davinci resolve, the free version, the paid version and the pirated version
• Always use libreoffice, not openoffice