I took a bunch of stuff from work that was gonna get recycled including a decent laptop and a flash drive. I work in network admin and IT if that narrows it down. Never used Linux before though.
Edit: Thanks everyone! I'm down for some problem solving so I think I'm gonna go the Arch/Manjaro direction so I can learn my way around Linux generally.
modern fedora is pretty cute, probably compatible with the laptop as well. debian is a classic for a reason. my favorite modern spin of it is pop, which does feel much more modern than the shipped desktop environments of some distros.