I’d say that Ubuntu is a great choice because there is a lot of support out there, in articles/support forums and apt repos for most things that you can just drop in. Even if you want to run the latest bleeding edge kernels the ppa support is excellent. For me it’s a pragmatic choice of distro even if ideologically I’d prefer to run plain Debian.
I’m rooting for OP, though. Starting their Linux journey on hard mode is something to be lauded!