What should I kickstart with?

I rock a hp elitebook 640 g4 i5 8530u with 8gb ram and 256gb storage I have the most techy brain in my friend group I wanna be into data center infrastructure management and system penetration but problem is they rock the latest ThinkPad p15 and all I'm 15 and 10th is starting What linux should I start with I'm the type of guy who uses music player just to not get ads and own my stuff and media My dad's old company workstation had a xeon but they thought it was obsolete so I just suggested to switch that debian to truNAS and add a few more hard drives Also whats a good upgrade idea for my laptop Ram and nvme are too wallet on fire for my broke ahh teen brain I use windows only because my work is all on there (New to this subreddit)