I have no faith in Microsoft as a company anymore.

Nope, I downvoted because you can get a hat for a raspberry pi that lets you do ai crap and is much smaller than that.

Start out with Linux Mint, it’s a debian/ubuntu based distro which has massive support online and is less likely to break during an update, then when you get use to using linux you can make a more personal decision for which distro suits you best.