

Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.
The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.
For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.
At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.
I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.
Yep, you can emulate, it does work, but there is a better option. Clone Hero works better, has lower performance requirements, supports all of the songs from all of the games, has great peripheral support, and has a whole community of people making modern songs available.
I would also recommend looking into a RetroCult controller mod if you really get into it. Quite a fun electronics project and suitable for someone with limited experience as it has been made very easy and only includes a little bit of soldering and cutting away a little bit of the case.