I used a bit of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Lucid Puppy and some variations of Debian before on multiple computers, but not enough to fully understand it.
Have used Windows for a very long time and I am kind of a power user (screw powershell, I am not touching that)
If you are not afraid of trying something a bit more harder to install, I would recommend Debian. It’s the most stable distro and doesn’t come with any proprietary software. If you need any proprietary firmware or prorietary Nvidia drivers, you will need to install them yourself though. During the installation you can choose the desktop environment you would like to use or keep the default, which is Gnome.