uhm, me. Or any of the various communities and forums that exist around the internet here are bound to have helpful people. Personally, i bumped to manjaro for a week. And once i was comfortable with it, i learned how to manually install arch linux. From there everything seemed doable, and it pretty much is 4 years later.

I would say it depends on your level of tech savvyness though, if you're highly savvy, and feel like you could manage it, then i'd say you should give it a shot. If not, there are plenty of simpler distros like mint that will keep your experience heavily curated, muta recently did a video about installing mint actually.

Personally i wouldn't recommend manjaro, it's not that it's bad, it's just kind of a mess. Long story. Installing arch linux manually or at least skimming through the guide gives you a great idea of what the general linux system is constructed of. Very useful if you ever run into problems with GRUB or something.

If you've used debian before and managed, you'd probably be fine, debian is a great choice for a workstation if you just don't want to think about it very much. It'll have a lot of old software, but it's incredibly stable. IMO, the best advice i can give is to spin up a vm, fuck around, and see what you like. Linux is about choice, exercising it is part of the process.

Oh uh, just don't dualboot with windows, windows has a nasty propensity for nuking disks randomly sometimes, every so often a windows update will wipeout grub (it's an easy fix but annoying and pretty daunting, if you've never done it before) on installs, it can sometime overwrite drives to place a bootloader there, i have no idea why.