You get my standard reply that I use zorin which is an ubuntu based distro that tries to give the look of feel of windows and has a lot of default installed things like wine/playonlinux, libreoffice, app for disc burning, rdp client, basically most everything I would want for day to day use. It is not necessarily the best gaming distro and its certainly not bleeding edge. Its a great install and get to doing things right away distro to me which is what I want.

Reguarding apps, you said typewriter, movies, music, games. Office suite look at LibreOffice. Movies and music if it is online just Firefox or any other browser you choose. Firefox is good at working with PDFs too. Any distro should come with a document viewer, photoviewer, video player, and music player. You can choose from tons of other or more advanced tools. Debian for example comes with over 60K packges and Ubuntu and Mint are similar. There are also 3rd party sources too. Flathub or Snapcraft for example if you want something not in the repos.

If you go with a Debian based distro with a lot of apps in the repos, you probably my not need these other app souces, but some people like smaller distros, something special just not in the repos, or a newer or different version of app. For example I use Joplin which is a notes app that is not in the Debian repos.

For apps finding an app name and starting links https://alternativeto.net is your friend. For distros, https://distrowatch.com is your friend. Strongly favor a distro in the top 10 on distro watch unless you have some special need.

Edit: You will notice that the top 10 are all Debian, Arch, Fedora, or SUSE based in that general order of more to less popularity. Linux distros tend to be based on these base distributions. For example Mint is based on Debian and so is Ubuntu.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux

Arch and Mint are the two most-used distros (Arch with double the Mint users) behind SteamOS(Steamdeck).

Installing Arch from the install medium is daunting for people so I'd recommend EndeavourOS. It's Arch but using a graphical installer and sane defaults for a desktop PC.

It seems intimidating because there's a lot of new terms and workflows seem to always involve the terminal. Learn to love the power of the terminal, don't be one of those "I use Linux but am scared of terminal commands" people.

If you've figured how to use wine then you're capable of searching your way to any solution I'm Arch (it's probably on the Wiki).

I like it and think I’ll be able to get used to it with practice. It reminds me weirdly of windows XP in how easily I can get everything to work the way I want.

xubuntu may be easier to switch for an xp user. Xfce is more malleable than all other desktop environments + ubuntu communities are active and less snobbish.

fedora also was surprisingly easy.

now i'm on arch and i asked myself countless times : Why are you doing this to yourself?

I recommend dual booting Windows and Linux until you're comfortable switching entirely. Sometimes you need to go back for just one task.

Always back up your files before installing a new OS. Data loss is always possible during installation, and more likely if you don't know what you're doing.

The Grub boot manager (included and installed by default with Linux Mint and some other distros) makes it easy to pick which OS to boot each time when turning the computer on.

Check out Lutris for non-Steam Windows games. It uses Wine, but is a lot more user friendly to set up and use.

I personally prefer Debian based distros just because of the number of apps in the software repo. Probably consider Ubuntu or Mint in your case. My wife and I have used Linux pretty exclusively for over 20 years. Ease of use is not that much of an issue once your setup. My wife and her dad are not technical and they have few issues.

Installing, and fixing issues is more technical but it is for Windows too especially if you do not get it preinstalled. You presumably have some stratagy for Windows support. Linux same, have a stratgey for it.

Mint is a safe bet, I would also suggest you have a look at Pop! OS and CachyOS once you feel a bit more comfortable with Linux and are curious at all. They have a bit more cool stuff to offer that you don't really get from windows imho

https://distrosea.com/ After following some of the recommendations here, you can look into this website to gets first look and feel for the distro before downloading the live USB.

I'd go basic debian . Install flatpak and flathub to get any packages that are too far out of date or might get so. Any derivative or ubuntu derivative just sees like unnecessary extra dependencies to me.

Debian gives i think a wider choice of desktop environment than any of the derivatives on install, but I think they're all much of a muchness really. Most of the DEs have the "Click something, window opens" feature.

make it as easy for yourself to reinstall as possible

This is basically the holy grail for finding how to do things or troubleshooting once you have the basics down: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

A large amount of information is transferrable to other distros, particularly if they use systemd.

I would also spend some time getting comfortable with the command line. There are a million tutorials, guides, and free courses on this topic. Find a shell and terminal emulator you like. I'm using Fish and Kitty these days.

Going against the grain, maybe consider EndeavourOS for a distro? https://endeavouros.com/

windows' is the correct way to form that since windows ends with an s

And you might say "don't be a dick" but to that I say: you want to use Linux. You need to learn how to type things correctly and accurately or your computer will not work. The rules of most command line programs are far more restrictive than the ' rule in English.