I personally use Trisquel (https://trisquel.info/) which is a GNU/Linux system for hardcore freedom-lovers as it runs completely without ANY proprietary components. However, I would not recommend this distribution for beginners as it is not very actively developed and rather clumsy to operate.

If you want to have a freedom-friendly operating system, Debian (https://www.debian.org/) is the way to go. If user-friendliness is important, you can go with Ubuntu or Linux Mint even though those distributions include proprietary components by default.

Fedora (https://getfedora.org/) is a RedHat-based system providing the latest bleeding edge packages, which might also be interesting for you. Regardless of how your decision looks like: Please let us know about it and have fun with the penguin. :-)