About six months back I started at my first job after being unemployed for the last six years and weirdly enough did not experience any “why didn't I start doing this sooner” feeling. Guess a really supportive family and the knowledge that i would be inevitably starting at a job some day made the transition almost a non event.
Slackware is another option as they are not going to rely on sytemd for their next release. Slackware's take on package management is also quite different from what is common today though.
If the real problem is misuse of clause of being underage by organized criminals, then laws against organized crime and even more importantly it seems in India's case the infrastructure to prosecute the guilty should be strengthened. Toughening the laws for under aged does not seem the appropriate response in that case.
Fedora currently, but planning to switch to Arch soon because Fedora comes with a lot of stuff that i simply don't need/want such as the constantly running tools for automatic bug reporting.
There are quite a few low end laptops available in India without any pre-installed OS. Most people who buy these end up using some pirated copy of windows which is either left unpatched and vulnerable or it comes with some form of malware already installed. It hasn't been great for security or privacy sadly. No one I know uses linux on them or forks out any money for a Windows license which they deem to be too costly.