Same here, but I’m a border generation (born in the late 90s)

Linux is free open source mate.

Classic recommendations are Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I think Zorin as well, but there are many others. For starters which one you use won’t matter too much, because more likely than not you’re gonna switch again.

I started with Ubuntu because it’s easy to use and I was new. One can argue over the pros and cons. I’m looking at Manjaro at the minute, an easy to install and beginner friendly Arch distro. Really, you can just try most of them out online though. Check out DistroSea and you can actually emulate the OSs with several desktop environments right in your browser.

This goes for life as well. Education? RTFM, studying is a skill and it can be done well as well as ineffectively. There’s many methods nowadays on how to study efficiently, as opposed to cramming knowledge into your short term memory through brute forced memorization (not that all knowledge from school is necessary to be kept).