Pig

I installed Zorin on a computer for someone who hardly uses a computer, and it was easy for them to get the hang of navigating it. If you're coming from windows, with not much Linux experience, it should be an easy transition. From what I remember, it's based on Debian. I've read, enabling their testing repos is a good way to keep as up to date on packages as you can, while keeping it stable. Debian strives for stability, over the most recent updates of packages. Which could be good in your case (You can always install Flatpak to get the most up-to-date packages, too). I'm not sure how Zorin fairs for gaming. You may want to consider Pop!_OS, or even just straight Debian. [email protected] has some great material on how to get Debian working for gaming. Later on, you could move to Arch. I've heard great things about EndeavourOS. Arch is known for being bleeding-edge and having the most up-to-date packages but you may come across instances where you need to troubleshoot a bit more (their wiki has almost anything you could want to know, though). Almost everything will run on Linux. Check out Proton, Lutris, and Bottles. And, obviously, Steam and Discord work on Linux, so you're good there.

I agree with your stance, and I can also acknowledge what other people are saying, about not being able to find companies anymore, that aren't willing to sell your information to multi-billion dollar targeted-ad companies. I would do what a couple other people, in this post, mentioned. Buy a used laptop/desktop, in cash, that supports coreboot. To my knowledge, anything past an i5 can't fully remove all of the IME blobs, anyways. If you want something for gaming, and don't want to support/contribute to the funneling of personal data, I would build a desktop from parts that work well with Linux, from a store like MicroCenter.