Having also been on Windows mostly, I played around with the Raspberry Pi this lead to Ubuntu Mate, which runs quite well on the Pi. Then I moved to Debian in headless mode for servers running on Proxmox. On my laptop, I use Linux Mint which basically recognised most of my Thinkpad but not the light. It has been mostly ok, takes time to work out how to do things but can be eventually sussed out. I’d suggest running a virtual machine and just load up various Linux distributions, see what takes your fancy. You can also load up an ISO on a USB stick and run it from that too.