When you start you go with mint and then you either arch if you want high maintain rolling updates or debian if you want stable distro thats just as good as arch! (Debian hates nvidia drivers for some reson so you need to update those if you have nvidia gpu tho).

I pay nothing im a big hater of the subscription model! I cringe everytime i see it lol but my bank takes like 6 euro a month on service fees if that counts?