I have sailed the seven seas since the 1990’s and IMHO, if you are in the US, the library system is the best answer for books and audio books.

I would avoid Ubuntu and Fedora because of their corporate shenanigans. I’ve had a very painless experience with Pop!_OS as my daily driver and there’s a version that comes with Nvidia support already baked in. Otherwise, I would recommend Mint D which is the version that ditched Ubuntu for pure Debían (what Ubuntu is a fork of).

I run Pop!_OS on an Early 2015 MBP 13. It’s pretty much flawless. The only thing that doesn’t work is the webcam, which is a bonus for my ugly mug.

Even Valve can’t help but tell everyone that they run Arch.