Linux

EndeavuorOS. It's a seamless base configuration of Arch which has a wonderful wiki that has a ton of stuff to tell you.

You can install pamac for a GUI for the package manager. Do yay to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR

For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer. For me Steam didn't work when xdg-portal-gnome was installed though and firefox-like apps booted real slow, so you may or may not want to try GNOME.

Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default

I still think Ubuntu or a flavor of it is the right answer for people new to Linux.

Additional to the Mint suggestions: Mint tones down the "Ubuntu-ness" of their default distribution, but it's still Ubuntu under the hood. LMDE is the version of Mint based on straight Debian skipping the Ubuntu "middle-man" if that sounds more appealing.

Can't speak to compatibility one way or another, though.

My computer is old and made of parts from well-known manufacturers. Everything in it is pretty well-known to the open-source community at this point, so that might well be giving me a huge advantage with regard to drivers and such. (Case in point, I have an NVIDIA graphics card and Intel i7 from the tail end of the era where people wouldn't advise you against getting either, and in fact might have outright recommended them over AMD. Yes, that old. Legacy proprietary drivers work fine for me.)

Any general purpose distro will work well for you. As others have said, Ubuntu and Mint are the standard recommendations.

Whatever distro looks good to you is a good place to start. Think of distros as default configurations, you can basically change most stuff whenever you want.

Avoid Arch, just in case.

Linux mint hands down

Debian with GNOME

Suggestions: Linux Mint: this is the most popular recommendation for new users. Its nice and stable, uses a familiar Windows-like layout, and should just work out of the box. Pop_OS!: this one is another popular option, which uses a layout similar to MacOS and has lots of features such as window tiling. It does use older package and isn't often updated, however. Zorin OS: this one is pretty similar to Linux Mint. It also offers some additional desktop layouts, but some of these are paid, so if you want an entirely free experience, this is not the best option.

Suggestions for if you enjoy suffering: Arch Linux: Requires manual installation. You have to download and configure all the things yourself. Good option for advanced users who want complete control over their system and all packages installed on it. Otherwise, stay away. Arch-based distros (Endeavour, Garuda, etc): Far simpler to install, but will likely require regular maintainance, due to frequent updates.