Linux

Any general purpose distro will work well for you. As others have said, Ubuntu and Mint are the standard recommendations.

Ubuntu is a good starting point.

You can follow the general idea of: "Are you new to Linux? If yes, use something you know other people know too. If no, use whatever the fuck you want, heck, make your own distro if you want".

I'd say try whatever looks good to you, you can always install something else if you don't like it, as long as it isn't Manjaro. (backup your data before you install something new)

Some distros that I think are a pretty good choice for starters (no particular order):

• Pop!_OS
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• Endeavour OS
• Linux Mint
• openSUSE Tumbleweed

You can also use Distrochooser to maybe help you make a decision.

Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn.

That's alright, you don't have to be a programmer to use Linux. You don't even have to use the command line if you don't want to (tho I recommend it, getting good at it feels pretty great).

EndeavuorOS. It's a seamless base configuration of Arch which has a wonderful wiki that has a ton of stuff to tell you.

You can install pamac for a GUI for the package manager. Do yay <packagename> to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns <packagename> to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR

For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer. For me Steam didn't work when xdg-portal-gnome was installed though and firefox-like apps booted real slow, so you may or may not want to try GNOME.

Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default

Additional to the Mint suggestions: Mint tones down the "Ubuntu-ness" of their default distribution, but it's still Ubuntu under the hood. LMDE is the version of Mint based on straight Debian skipping the Ubuntu "middle-man" if that sounds more appealing.

Can't speak to compatibility one way or another, though.

My computer is old and made of parts from well-known manufacturers. Everything in it is pretty well-known to the open-source community at this point, so that might well be giving me a huge advantage with regard to drivers and such. (Case in point, I have an NVIDIA graphics card and Intel i7 from the tail end of the era where people wouldn't advise you against getting either, and in fact might have outright recommended them over AMD. Yes, that old. Legacy proprietary drivers work fine for me.)

Linux mint hands down

Whatever distro looks good to you is a good place to start. Think of distros as default configurations, you can basically change most stuff whenever you want.

Avoid Arch, just in case.

Debian with GNOME