Linux Mint is pretty good, it has a Windows 7 kind of feel to it. Fedora is also nice, it great for tablet, also with touch. Both work pretty well and consistently out of the box.

mint! its popular for beginners, ubuntu based, user friendly, lots of tutorials/troubleshooting help

Mint is great for beginners. I never had any issues with it and the cinnamon desktop is very nice.

Pop!_os for sure but dont mess up the gui like linustechtips did

Pop!_OS is the absolute best for beginners. Pick KDE if you want a Windows experience and Gnome if you want a Mac experience.

Watch a few beginner tutorials on YouTube and see which one appeals to you most.

Nvidia? Pop!_OS probably.

Mint is great but its using the legacy display manager so some people witg multi monitors with different frame rates bla bla had issued with it tho.

Depends a lot on use case, certainly!

Also, do you like a "bottom up" or "top down" approach? Grabbing a raspberry pi and setting up a headless (no monitor) home server is a great bottom up way of getting familiar with things

learn to configure various services and whatnot from the command line. Or, just start with a user-friendly distro with a GUI you like, and gradually work your way up to looking under the hood.