It doesn’t matter what you pick, there’s so much to learn and so much grass is greener thought process going on that barring a irl group to conform to or workplace requirement you’re gonna try a million different things before you figure it out.
If you use mint, the step you need to pay attention during and read instructions for asks if you wanna “install alongside windows”.
Just make sure you recognize the drive/partition you want to use and if you don’t, take note of the way the installer describes them and figure out which one is which.
If you decide to go with bazzite I can check out how that one presents the choice too.