I personally like Fedora, but I've heard good things about Mint. I'm just not a fan of anything Debian-based--but that's a personal preference, not a technical one.
I hear ya. I have a client who uses W10 though, and I need to have something around where I can play with so as to appear to be knowldegeable—lol! I have W7pro on my main box and it’s tweaked pretty wwell for privacy.
Linux runs on raspberry pi’s, and I just bought a couple. Soo..need to learn them. I’m actually going to be running a stripped version of labView on them. Beaglebone also.
Danger will robinson! Learning curve ahead!