Whoa! You all gave me a lot of great information, and it's all very helpful. I'll address it momentarily, but first I should clarify just a couple things that I probably should have said in the first place (sorry):

- What I'm probably going to do is make a small partition of my hard drive, install Linux on that, and use it just for the Internet and anything that I want to download (including Windows games from this website), and really not much else. Then I'll restart in Windows and play the games and use software, but with the Internet completely disabled, so that I don't have to worry about spyware at all.

- However, my issue about compatibility was partially a curiosity about whether I could get some games to work in Linux (though I don't know if it would be necessary at all), and partially because I would like to test some Java programs to make sure that they can run in Linux as well as Windows (theoretically they should be able to though).

- In addition to avoiding telemetry, I want to make sure to avoid other things that could potentially be problematic for other reasons, such as clipboard history and a universal clipboard. Does anyone know if any of these versions of Linux even support those things, and if so, how to disable them?

- I also will need to completely disable the virtual memory paging file/swap file (I have tons of RAM anyway), any sort of hibernation mode, or for that matter, anything that will take the contents of RAM and arbitrarily save it to the hard drive whenever it feels like it.

- Whichever one I choose, I may also want to recommend it to other people (for simple uses) who are not necessarily great with computers (they're not programmers or anything like that), so it would be nice if even a layman could use it.

Now to address you individually (also, anyone feel free to read all of this if you want, because you might be able to answer a question even if I asked someone else):

Engerek01, thanks for a lot of useful information, and I've read through some of the websites, so I should be able to get some good information from that. As for downloading and compiling source code, no thanks, because I'm not familiar with this specific stuff and how it works, and I know it could easily turn out wrong.

morrowslant, Incognito sounds very interesting, but is it easy to set up and use?

rtcvb32, you've mentioned several different ones, but I'm having trouble determining which one you recommend the most or the least.

Lin545, Guix sounds good, but is it easy to set up and use? When you say I have to write my own configuration file it seems like the answer is no.

kusumahendra, a lot of people seem to be recommending Mint, but do you know if it tracks searches the way that plain Ubuntu evidently does (according to an article in one of the posted links)? Also, I've actually been using Libre Office in Windows (the newest version of Office that I have is 2000 and that seemed a bit outdated), and I'd say that for the most part it works well, except that the spell-checker is HORRIBLE!

huppumies, this is very important: does Mint have the same problem with tracking as Ubuntu does, or are there any other privacy concerns with Mint?

nightcraw1er, it is possible to avoid this kind of crap, but one must go to great lengths.

timppu, well, when I try to disable updates it keeps re-enabling them. I even changed the program that does the auto-updates to give it fake credentials, trying to trick it into thinking that it doesn't have the authority to run, but it still keeps re-enabling it! And I'm using Pro version, btw. Yeah I'm leaning towards Mint I think, but I'll ask you as well: are there any privacy issues with Mint, such as how Ubuntu tracks text/file searches? This was mentioned in an article, and you've given a couple examples about how Mint is more private (thanks for the info) but you didn't mention that specifically, and it's a very important issue for me.

Ganni1987, thanks for your opinion, and I'll take that into consideration as well.

aRealCyborg, alright, so you don't like Ubuntu, but you like the variant Mint, though you've never tested it... well, I'm not sure what to say to that exactly, though the opinion seems to be fairly consistent with what a lot of other people are saying anyway.

Sachys, watching videos to compare them - that may be a good idea, but a lot of what's important in an OS is what it does behind the scenes, not just the interface.

rojimboo, alright, I'll avoid anything that's Arch and lean toward Mint (as long as it doesn't have any privacy problems that I'm not yet aware of). As for your advice about what to do with Firefox, Origin, webRTC, ufw, etc., I'm really not sure that I followed any of that. I'm a technical person with a lot of knowledge about computers so you don't need to dumb anything down for me, but I think you just abbreviated the explanation too much and mentioned a lot of things that I'd never heard of (except Firefox). And no, I wasn't going to try to run Windows programs on Linux.

timppu, I guess I could try that, but I've never installed a virtual box before, so I'm not sure about that, and it seems like a lot of work to install like 10 different versions of Linux (well, maybe not that many) to ultimately pick one, when I could just research them and decide that way. But to answer your question about the quality of my computer, it's pretty high-end and only a couple of months old, so that shouldn't be an issue, anyway

EDIT: also, it needs to be possible for me to disable the Internet connection altogether, whenever I feel like it, without having to unplug anything.