Linux

My best advice is:

Don't listen too much about what strangers on the Internet say you should do or use.

Non of us has statistics to pull from. Mostly it's individual experience mixed with personal preferences. All that could be different for someone else. E.g. some people will have problems with Nvidia, other with AMD.

Stick to the basic and add fancy stuff later on.

Don't pick a distribution because of the Desktop environment. Or because someone said it has a nifty feature. People create new distros all the time just for fun and not because there would be a real reason for it. Looking on the release cycle would probably be the most basic decision you should take. Read about the differences between "rolling release" and "long time support" and decide base on you personal use case.

Have a backup strategy

This is nothing limited to Linux but since you are planing to switch your habits, there is a high possibility you will mess up at some point. Best would be you try to stimulate the worst case and look if you would be able to setup your system in a VM or something.

Don't be afraid to try things out

Especially when you know that your backup is working. There is not much you can lose. Don't be afraid of using Arch Linux e.g. just because someone on the Internet said it's just for pros or something.

So this last one is maybe just the consequences of all the above. But yeah I guess that's all I could say for now 😅