I live in TN ( for now ) and our Trump loving leadership is making a fine case for moving out of state.

Ubuntu my dude. I started fiddling with it years ago and it’s my go to when I need a good desktop / gaming system. Any distro is gonna be a steep learning curve and a great way to go about it is to get a crapola system and start banging Linux on it. You’ll be frustrated and then search and find that there is a massive amount of community support for most distros. I use a Raspberry PI 4 running Ubuntu 64 for all my AV needs… Drives the projector and stereo and also serves as a retro gaming over the projector deal. We’re all fed up with windows.