G;day zwling, and Welcome to linux.org
I like your words :
something simple......
Make it easy on yourself....LINUX MINT
Cinnamon Mate Xfce
(heavyish) (very light & fast)
They all have tons of support.
In your thinking about "the switch"....have you spared any thoughts for dual booting ?
I dont do it, but some do. makes the setting up a trifle more complicated.....but still easy enough
Dual boots with Win 10 are quite common. I also note that after a while many blow away the Win 10 and just use the Linux. (unless they are gamers....they seem to need win 10)
I dont dual boot. I run Linux Mint
Exclusively
I do all the usual surfing, facebook, youtube, emails by the ton, forum work here , etc etc etc etc
.....and I consider it the best OS I have ever used
I also download and use all sorts of weird stuff on it, and because I use Timeshift (more later) i have never broken it (oops....that was a lie...I have broken it, but thats another story....I simply reinstalled and away I went again )
Have a look at Distrowatch....it will surely confuse you....there are more OS's available there than you have had hot breakfasts.
Best Advice ....Keep It Simple
Play with Linux for a while until you are either happy or in need of more stimulation.
One Question : Is there anything on your Win 7 PC that you need to keep?....like Pics, Music, Documents/data, Movies, TV shows....etc ???
If you simply Install Linux as the only OS (operating system) on the PC, then everything.....and I mean
EVERYTHING will be wiped out on the hard drive.
Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up to date and comfortable desktop operating system.
linuxmint.com
Want to try one out ? you will need to READ this a few times to get an understanding of what is entailed.......after the second or third read you may discover that it is not as complicated as it first appears
First, you can -- __and should__ -- try Linux Mint before switching to it. Fortunately, unlike other operating systems, Linux distros like Mint make it easy to give them a test run before installing it. First you'll need to download a copy of Linux Mint, which comes with three different...
www.linux.org
ps. Someone else will no doubt talk to you about splitting that 1 TB hard drive up into partitions, so that you can put the OS on one partition and the rest of your ":stuff" movies, pics, music on another slice.....etc