I'm trans and I really don't want to federated with these people if their mods are defending the -tard suffix and they aren't getting de-modded and banned. I also don't want to be federated with them if they ban critiquing western chauvinism.
Someone who is an admin and with more of a level head than me RN please talk to their admins about it.
I've been on Linux for like 17 years so I can't really share an "I switched" experience that will be comparable to yours - I was a teenager and wanted a fully 64 bit OS when those were brand new and windows didn't yet support it. my only option at the time was gentoo and I had to do a full install by hand - it took two weeks of work cause I had no clue what I was doing and building toolchains takes forever.
luckily, that's all in the past now and you can just install a distro that's ready to go with a nice graphical installer. just pick something reasonably popular like Ubuntu or Mint and you'll be good to go.