Pretty much any distro will do, but Ubuntu-based ones tend to be easier to use due to having menus and buttons for most everything. As for apps, here are my suggestions
~3D~
Blender
~DAW~
Ardour
LMMS
Bitwig
~VIDEO EDITING~
Davinci Resolve (if on Nvidia)
Kdenlive
Olive (alpha software, be wary of crashes and save often)
~IMAGES~
GIMP
Krita
Photopea (web app)
Inkscape
Lights may be possible with OpenRGB but I haven't personally messed with these kinda of software
Any parents that suggest D&D are automatically awesome in my book
Start with something designed around a graphical interface, pretty much anything based on Ubuntu will do this (Linux Mint, Zorin, Pop!_OS, etc).
If you use Nvidia Pop!_OS has an ISO file with Nvidia drivers already installed. It isn't hard to get Nvidia drivers on other distros but the more done for you the better.
Also recommend, refind has saved my dual boot machines more times than I can count
Welcome to dual booting with Windows! Best advice I can give is try to keep Windows away from your Linux drive as it doesn't like to share. A 2nd drive for your Linux install can save a ton of headache (I went so far as to put Windows on my old PC when I upgraded).
Really hope you got one of the later variants of covid, they got weaker over time so they may not be as bad. I got it too last year despite being vaxxed and while it sucked the first few days it let up fairly quickly.
Sounds like Steam and Proton may be broken. do sudo apt purge steam and then delete all your Proton prefixes in I think its ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata (the folders will all be game ID numbers) then reinstall Steam and try again. I'm running the game with the launcher on Pop!_OS 22.04 which is Ubuntu based and have no problems. However I set in the launcher to use Vulkan instead of DirectX
Update for anyone seeing this, someone has forked Infinity for Reddit into Eternity for Lemmy which basically 1:1 with Infinity, which was my go-to Reddit app! Its on on Codeburg with a version 0.1.0 at the time of this comment
"Gaming" distros, save for Steam OS as that's for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
YES!!! Infinity was my go-to app for Reddit!
I'm amazed I have a Pi 4 as the whole shortage/scalping started not even 2 weeks after I ordered mine.
I've been needing a 2nd one for a project for over a year now...
You may need to move away from Ubuntu to an Ubuntu-based distro. Pop!_OS still packages firefox as a deb