Fedora 32 Workstation is pretty good if you want to see the best of what Linux can offer. It may not be the lightest and fastest distribution but it is easy to install and everything works. You'll get to experience Gnome which is the most original Linux desktop environment and the best one in terms of user experience in my opinion.
If you want something more traditional with the start menu or dock or desktop icons, perhaps something like KDE Neon is better place to start. It might feel more familiar. Will be lighter/faster too.
Put each of them on a USB and run them live on your machine for few minutes each and see which one makes more sense to you.
Note: I really wanted to like WSL, but it just didn't work for me.
I just recently switched from Mac OS to windows and it really hasn’t been a bad experience.
I would go full Linux but the drivers for the GPU on my laptop seem to be a bit of a mess currently.
But no, haven't tried WSL2, I'm comfortable with my Linux setup so not to keen on messing with it at the moment :)
The feeling reminds me of the first Macbooks I used when switching away from Windows Vista.
So far Ubuntu has been great as a default dev/staging workstation. It’s nice not to have to fight with homebrew or docker permissions or other issues on the Mac and spin up most anything.. and it just works.
By far the best linux I've tried when trying to get feature parity with macOS.
It is lightweight, since you choose everything that is installed, sort of opt-in.
It has all the latest software.
It has "rolling releases" which means there is never a giant lost-weekend distribution upgrade.
It has the AUR (arch user repository) for just about any software ever.
"it should simply work" is not a given on any linux.
I'm not denigrating those distributions, there are lots of reasons to have a stable release without a lot of things changing (especially development).
It's just that changing lots of assumptions at once is fragile.
No outdated packages, no ppa. No upgrade. Install is rough but it nails how simple the system is.
Ubuntu is a good starting point. But there is so much more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD
For debian/ubuntu it is not as straightforward.
Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.
Edit: and WSL is not Linux
It is Linux as of WSL2, it's just also Windows, so you lose many of the advantages that would make a person recommend Linux in this thread.
Plus, if you're already familiar with how Debian works it should be a no brainer. None of that Ubuntu or other Debian-derived distros with extra sugar and bloat and that many times differ from actual Debian in just the right way to keep you scratching your head.
Even Debian "stable" is pretty good for desktop these days which in the past was always notorious for having super outdated packages but has greatly improved in that regard. Obviously, "sid" is still also a good pick for a desktop if you really need to always run the latest of mostly everything.
I personally have really no issues with systemd and now even go as far as completely removing the ifupdown, isc-dhcp-client, resolvconf and ntpd packages in favor of having my entire network stack configured by systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved and systemd-timesyncd instead.
It's pretty much a standard now across the board and I can't really find any arguments against it besides old habits so I've embraced it. Although it's obviously a bit opinionated, there is a good deal of functionality and flexibility on that thing.
That's also what seems worst about it. Unfortunately there seem to be few other choices these days.
On mobile it's much better with Android, but Android isn't adapted to laptops. I haven't tried ChromeOS but it's pretty restricted from what I understood. WSL2 on Windows is Linux and it works great for me but I understand if you don't want windows in your life.
if you want: nice experience out of the box
I would recommend: Arch, Gentoo, Debian Net inst, Void
if you want a base system and install things you want on top of it
It's ubuntu without the bullshit monitization.