beginner friendly linxu distro?

Mint is always a good starting point.

Don't use plain ubuntu, it uses snaps for a lot of stuff and it breaks many little things. Mint is based on ubuntu, but without involuntary snaps.

You should take a look at the available desktop environments: Cinnamom, XFCE and Mate for limux mint. Pick the one that looks nicest to you or cinnamon if you can't decide.

Also check out gnome and KDE, those don't come with mint but starting on a different distro isn't a problem.

Anyways, the distro doesn't matter too much. The differences apart from desktop environments (and snaps) are tiny.

I recommend Pop! OS. It's stable and their ISOs already have GPU drivers ready to go.

I agree with @nottheengineer@feddit.de. However, if you want a more basic distro, with less risk to break stuff, Debian could be better, as it also has a UI for apt (synaptic) and many DEs to choose from (Gnome, KDE, XFCE...) but apart from this less polish and custom programs which could break by customization. Note that it has much less recent software as it aims for stability rather than being up to date, which could be an advantage if you want to tinker a lot.

Debian or Debian based distros are always my goto. Specially Linux Mint, Pop_OS, KDE Neon or plain Debian.

I recommend fedora based on my experience. You can also try any of the Ubuntu based distros as you will find more support online.

I recently switched from Windows to Linux for the first time.

I went with Debian and I am happy with it!

Plain Debian. Minimal installation size, huge app repository, can find tutorials for almost anything everywhere. Any OS you can fudge up from the terminal. I suggest making a second rig, one where the stuff on it isn’t very important, and just learn without worrying about erasing your /home directory. Short of that, install on a second hard drive and dual boot that way. I would not install on the same drive as your windows install.

Keep in mind that "stable" in software and especially in Linux usually means "has few bugs and the API won't change" rather than "doesn't randomly crash."
That first part usually translates into "is rather outdated and thus can't support the latest hardware."
Modern Linux isn't prone to random crashes unless you run on the absolute bleeding edge of development or on janky hardware.

With that in mind I can't recommend Debian- or Ubuntu-based distros, since they're out-of-date by design. While the learning curve of vanilla Arch Linux may be a little steep for most newbies, I still recommend taking a look at Arch-based distros like EndeavorOS.
You won't have to configure everything from scratch, although that is highly educational and I recommend doing it at some point for the learning experience. But you still get to take full advantage of the Arch wiki. Likely the best-maintained Linux wiki in existence.

Distro hopping is the way. I started with mint. LMDE is what I recommend. I heard good reviews about fedora too