Mint is the way to go. Easy UI, stupidly stable, relatively up-to-date, easy to fix problems.

You forgot the ‘s’ after http. Your link currently opens a blank for me until I put an ‘s’ behind it.

Do a dual boot, that’s what I did. If after some time you feel like the windows partition is unnecessary, delete it. If after deletion it suddenly seems to become necessary, it is always possible to reinstall windows, there are tutorials online on how to do that.