In terms of WMs, I would say sway and river are the most straightforward to setup, the rest like dwl and hyprland might require more setup for different reasons like hyprland outside of arch but it works well in my machine
I would just use kdenlive personally since the UI is very straightforward. I think almost every distro has kdenlive, and if it isn’t on the package manager of the distro you can install it as a flatpak as well.
Maybe try distros that have more recent updates, might feel less clunky, like nobara, fedora, openSuse (the semi-rolling release version), garuda and PopOs.
Also would recommend trying out the distros before you install them in a virtual machine since it’s easier to try multiple distros without the hassle of setting them up. Since you are in windows at the moment, you probably should try virtualbox
Edit: ventoy is a pretty cool project for when you want to setup a pen with the installation isos to the baremetal.
I would suggest trying other distros like some people here mention like popOS, nobara, garuda, open suse (try the semi-rolling release one), fedora, endeavourOS, etc.
This might give you a better experience out of the box without too much tinkering, since sometimes compatibilities with the hardware and with some software can occur (for example I tried to do a garuda install in the past and it didn’t work for me but to a lot of people it worked).
Also when you get more experienced with linux, you probably can fix those issues more easily, but for now probably the best option is to try a different distro and see how it goes.