Step 1: Take a look at the most popular desktop environments: Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce. If possible, consider even booting up a so-called live-usb and/or VM for some proper testing.
Step 2: Pick either one out of Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE and Pop!_OS as long as they provide a Flavor/Spin of your favorite desktop environment (which you should have found out by now (See Step 1)). While not exhaustive, the following might help you out:
If you have an Nvidia GPU, then just use Pop!_OS. Unless you really, but like really hate its GNOME implementation.
Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are arguably the most newbie-friendly out of these. This doesn’t mean that Fedora or openSUSE are hard by any means. (Heck, I started my Linux journey with Fedora.) However, both Fedora and openSUSE are known for their great adherence to FOSS. Therefore, some decisions related to initial setup might not have been taken with a focus on making it as user friendly as possible.
If security is your highest priority, then consider either one of Fedora or openSUSE with GNOME/KDE Plasma. It’s not like the others are security nightmares, however Fedora and openSUSE are known to take security more seriously than the others do.
Both Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are distros that are based on LTS distros. As such, the base system will not change a lot until you upgrade to the next big release; which happens once every two years. Fedora, is able to change more considerably between its major releases; which happen once every half year. On the other hand, openSUSE Tumbleweed doesn’t really hold back updates at all; there’s an (almost) constant stream of updates. Though openSUSE also offers distros with a ‘more stable^[1]^’ release cycle; the likes of Slowroll and Leap come to mind.
Where can I find useful resources for learning about a given distribution?
Consider asking it here. We’ll do our best to answer. Furthermore, DistroWatch.com is a great resource.
Stable, in this context, refers to slow to no rate of change while running software. So, in this context it isn’t used to convey breakage etc.