Linux

let him rest, he has lost his mind from all the compiling through the years

I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu's flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I'm not sure).

You either love or hate GNOME, there's a lot of padding, and it's very "minimal" and "clean". Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the "dock" (GNOME's version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)

KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it's kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I'm using KDE Plasma.

Cinnamon is Linux Mint's homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won't have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it's really useful!). If you don't like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn't for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.

There's also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less "modern" than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn't perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).

Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that's one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It's kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don't be afraid to pick the "wrong" desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)

Zorin has a commercial license for additional GUI front ends, installation support, and a bunch of "professional" apps. It's not clear if they've done something to make adobe/Autodesk/pro audio stuff work on Linux, pre-bundled their FOSS alternatives, or have made software themselves.

Personally, if I was looking for something "professional", I'd go PopOS!. But if I were a small or mid-sized business I'd consider Zorin Pro if I could get license to include additional support outside the installer... Or just buy System76 computers with PopOS! pre-installed and support built-in to their sales pipeline already.

That said, Mint is also very Windows (classic)-like in their GUI experince (intentionally). It also has one of the largest Linux communities focusing on GUI usability.

Depends on your use case on which flavor you should go. But for $50, I'm curious what Zorin's software suite is and might dive in.

I'd advise using Mint in place of Ubuntu as your training wheels/potential daily driver, since Ubuntu's developers (Cannonical) have the habit of making features and restrictions absent in the rest of the ecosystem (Snap comes to mind).

Mint has a much larger and more dedicated userbase, so you probably will have an easier time finding answers to questions (Mint's forums are pretty good nowadays), and it's been an established "Windows jumping-off point" OS for quite a few years now. Zorin is the new kid on the block (while they existed in the past, their quality was nowhere near on par with Mint), so I'd wait and see before checking them out.

I'm not saying that Mint is bad. But with Kubuntu or Fedora KDE you get more overall support, and KDE software is much more used, developed, tested and supported than Mint's self-mantained things.

There is a much higher chance of KDE thriving in the next 10 years than Mint.

This is my opinion, of course. And based mostly on my subjective observations.

blasphemy in this church.

Indeed tis spoken oft as heresy in the Cathedral...

...But perhaps opinions are more diverse in the Bazarr?