Looking for suggestions of what distros to try out

I'm not a complete noob but I haven't used a linux OS in at least 7 years when I had an old chromebook with Ubuntu. I have coding experience and I'm fairly comfortable working from a terminal but I'd like a nice looking GUI and to have a user friendly option so my wife isn't bamboozled when she uses my computer. That being said, I don't necessarily need it working "out of the box" (i don't need pre-installed softwares, I'm picky about my apps anyway) and I'm fine with needing to research a bit and spend time learning how to fix something when I break it. I also am not having performance issues with windows 11 I just hate microsoft and I'm ready to get out of this abusive relationship.

Fairly trivial use cases but here are the highlights:

Secure file sharing is important to me. I seed and torrent a lot of totally legal files. I'm sure on any distro I can figure out how to get my crucial apps like qBittorrent, AirVPN, libation, calibre, and jellyfin but I want to be able to easily show my wife how put our files onto her e-reader/iPhone. I'm most nervous about the file sharing process with audiobooks and her iPhone. Also as a bonus I'd love for the process of preserving my qbit profile to be simple but not sure if that is dependent on the distro I select.

On my personal computer i like using Python and a little bit of sql but I'm sure I'll get comfortable using VSCodium for these and I'm not worried about it. I manage a couple web apps that I made in RStudio so if there are any distros that don't play nice with R, i'd like to avoid them.

In the future I'd love to get back into gaming. It's not the phase of life I'm in right now (and that's okay) but I want to have the option to return to gaming in the future. Save your judgement but I use a controller even when I game on PC. I'd like to pick a distro that is compatible with this dream of a gaming future.

PC specs: i5 9600k, GTX 1070, 16gb ram