Ubuntu is decent, but they've had their own metadata-harvesting scandals, so I would avoid it since you care about privacy. Linux Mint might be a good alternative if you want to take advantage of being downstream from Debian (not worth as much nowadays as it used to be, but still very big).
For search engines, there are a few different strategies: you can use small independent search engines and hope they don't go evil, use a search engine based in a political adversary of your home country (they probably won't give data to your government), run a meta-search engine like searx or a p2p engine like yacy, use a VPN+separate browser for all non-official internet browsing (to avoid fingerprinting), or some combination of the above.
As Linux tends to be, you can modify it as you wish in the same way you can with absolutely every other Linux distro. I have clfswm running on one of mine, and that's about as far off the beaten path as you can possibly get.
It never gets mentioned in the Linux comparison charts, but it is so well developed for desktop use that it should be. It is based on Debian, so you have access to just about everything you can think of as well.
download the ones you like write them to your USB or burn it to a DVD disc and run it. if you don't like that one write another one to USB or burn to DVD disc
For beginners I usually install Xubuntu or Linux mint XCFE. As I slowly increased my Linux knowledge i now use arch based distros, manjaro and ArcoLinux
search engines: I use Qwant, Swisscows and ecosia
No more anti-virus and anti-malware programs taking hours to complete and using valuable system resources.
no more windows updates.
total freedom
It may not be the greatest distro, but it's polished enough for end-users.
The default Gnome interface might be different than what you're used to, but I don't think it'll take too long to get used to it.
Fedora is also an excellent distro. I personally use Fedora.
As for search: Kagi (paid) and Qwant are pretty sound and don’t track you.
no, you cannot escape google, bing, and yandex. is duckduckgo even truly secure? what if it's just psyop honeypot by international 3 letter agencies?
kiding aside, yes i recommend ubuntu and duckduckgo.