Well, I really got carried away with this post below…
I understand that you have already chosen your distribution and desktop environment, but I will publish the post anyway, in case you or someone else will find it useful.
Trust me, it really does. If you are new, you likely won’t last even five minutes against something like i3 or Sway (unless you are a real advanced power user).
When it comes to distribution, I would recommend you Bazzite (or anything else from Universal Blue). It is Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue on steroids.
It is immutable/atomic (read “hard to break”) extremely popular and officially supported and tested by Framework.
When it comes to the desktop environment, you have two main choices: GNOME and KDE Plasma. There are always Cinnamon (if you are really into Windows), Pantheon (if you are really into macOS) and brand new COSMIC but they are less common to find by default thus harder to install, especially if you are new to Linux.
There is also Budgie. Don’t know what to say about it, besides that it exists.
I personally use Bazzite Linux with GNOME + Dash to Panel extension, since I believe that one has to get PhD to master KDE Plasma.
I switched to it from my favorite Fedora Silverblue.
I believe that GNOME is great (NOT vanilla, with Dash to Panel and minimize and maximize buttons enabled) for everybody, including dummies like me. But of course it’s Linux community and everyone’s preferences are different, so I agree you should try everything yourself it is the only way to choose. I’m just saying that there are probably only two options for you right now, not a billion: GNOME and KDE Plasma. Maybe COSMIC in the future.
P.S. Flatpak apps work across distributions. AppImage apps work too, but have billion FUSE-related problems.