>>8184I can only recommend what I experienced, and I started out with Debian with XFCE because I was afraid every other distro would brick on me rather quickly (a fear that came from experience as neither Mint nor Fedora worked when I first tried to install them).
However, through all the experience I've gained trying to learn new things, I do not recommend jumping straight into Gentoo or something similar from
>Square 0, unless you have the patience and the discipline to not give up when you don't know what the fuck is going on.
Start with usual stuff like Mint, or even Ubuntu (though I don't want to recommend Ubuntu due to philosophical reasons).
As you go on using them, you will naturally develop a preference to either keep using the distro, or try out newer stuff. And when that happens, unlike Windows, changing distros on Linux is a piece of cake.
>general lack of enough free spaceOne thing I realized from your post was that, Windows makes it as hard as possible to even know what files you have on your own machine. You don't know where your config files are, your personal files are scattered all around the filesystem, you could have giant files leftover from uninstalled software in ProgramFiles, it's a total mess.
>worries over losing access to ... files>Shockwave or QuickTime filesThere could be alternatives, brave search says you can run QuickTime files with VLC or MPV, but I'm not sure. You can try running them in a virtual machine, or you could try converting them to something more universally supported. You can try all the things you're uncertain of in a virtual machine. Additionally, if it ever comes down to it, you can install Windows on a virtual machine in linux just to run those files/for certain features.