You're going to distro hop (we all do) so just start somewhere. It's debian based, so what you learn will be applicable to like 80% of the distros out there.
I like gnome. Plasma is nice too. Lately I've just been using minimal i3 window manager.
They're all basically the same dude. They're all GNU/Linux. You have 2 main distros: Debian and Arch. Fedora is a kind of inbetween, there's SUSE as well, but mostly it's all Debian and Arch.
Mint, Ubuntu, etc ... it's all just Debian. Use Debian.You can use KDE plasma or Gnome or i3 or whatever you want.
wdym? Every single week there's protests. Are you part of an org? If you're part of an org maybe you'll hear about them more?