Yeah there is just so much choice now with Linux audio, all of those above are good for beginners. My son regularly uses Guitarix and hydrogen when he is working on something new, before the band get together with the real hardware. Ardour is a great introductory DAW that people can learn before they move on to something like Reaper or pro tools.
With the introduction of pipewire as well recently, the whole Alsa, jack, pulse nightmare is rapidly looking like a thing of the past.
Had almost the exact same experience with Ubuntu studio when setting it up for my son. Fantastically easy to install but ended up with just an overwhelming amount of ‘stuff’ there we really didn’t need.
Carla, Cadence, Audacity, Ardour, Guitarix, Hydrogen, Couple of VST synths to get you started and you have a basic studio that can be installed and ran on almost any Linux Distro.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop Environment, PoP Os with their Cosmic/gnome desktop environment, or Fedora workstation with KDE desktop environment. Pick one of those three and roll with it ;)
There are tonnes of reasons why these are good/bad choices but simply put. They are all very well documented (mint and Pop are Ubuntu based), Fedora has a very active and helpful community.
Cinnamon on mint and KDE on fedora are both very much like windows in the way they look and behave. PoP Os is a bit more Mac like with their desktop.
I personally use an Arch based distro (endeavour OS) but the three above are just much easier to sink your teeth into.
You could try Sandwine https://github.com/hartwork/sandwine not used personally but looks like it has enough restrictions built in.
Most mainstream distros will work with pretty much all of the software suggestions. I tend to avoid recommending Ubuntu these days as Canonical have some stubborn ideas regarding things (snaps should have been shelved long ago in favour of flatpack), that said, PoP-Os is an excellent choice for buntu based without the snaps.
Video,editing: shotcut is pretty good alongside Kdenlive. For anyone working with audio, Audacity is a definite must have for track/sample editing and effects. Whilst Ardour is an extremely capable DAW, there are others you might want to check out, LMMS is a nice sequencer (fruity loops) DAW for example. On the professional side there is Bitwig (never used it but heard good things about it) and my personal favourite Reaper.
I’ve been running Pipewire in pro audio setup for my son and his band mates since the early days of the project. Granted I did run into some issues at first, but for a long time now it has been solid as a rock. With all of the plugins it is a joy to work with, no more Jack, Jack 2, Alsa, Pulse bridging and configuration nonsense, it all just ‘works’ now.
I would recommend it to anyone as a first option when setting up anything audio related on Linux now.