Just try few of these from live usb and pick what you like.

You can use Ventoy and just drag all your ISO images to it but creating few USBs is easiest option for beginners.

There is nothing bad about Debian/Debian based distros and I think that it is great option I started on Mint, tryed Manjaro and get back to Mint.

I love Flatout soundtrack - wreck cars and listen to Symphony of destruction and other songs.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKlbTXjy-F6q9qbt1hM78aD9dvXTMOMDG

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKlbTXjy-F6qz1HCLkVOMjQS2XnxYEIGO

This is already cross post. It was posted somewhere few days ago.

It has everything you may want to use - LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird …

Some programs aren’t supported for Linux but you can find replacement. For me it has 100% of tools that I need.

When you go from windows to mint - they feel similar (UI), but some things are different (installing programs, settings…)

It is just solid out of the box experience. You don’t have to customise it to be usable, complete suite of programs and it is stable.

Some of really light distros for old PCs are missing lot of these things but you may need to explore those options if it doesn’t run well.

Try mint with Xfce - on 64 bit machines and then go lighter.

Planned obsolescence was first introduced for lightbulb, according to Veritasium video on YT. But for most things it is relatively new thing (20 years).