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.
I heard the latest Ubuntu was actually really good, it even uses Wayland by default
edit: apparently snap is bad lol and it's pushed to the point that getting through apt-get actually retrieves it from snap lol, maybe do steer away from fucky wucky shit like that. it's too bad that Ubuntu's gnome implementation goes to waste for a dumb canonical decision.