that 'designated distro' for newcomers used to be ubuntu. probably still is. as much as i'd want to say mint or some other variant of ubuntu or debian that i happen to like.. 'one man shows' and distros with very small teams aren't what a new user should be going with. there's a reason why so many base off ubuntu. it's big. it's solid. and it just works.
ublock origin is published to the addon 'store' for edge and opera, in addition to mozilla's (firefox and thunderbird) and chrome. links to all are on the repo's main page https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
keep doing what you're doing; if you need to get whatever runs in windows out of a vm and on 'bare metal'--get a separate system for that and network the two to share files, if needed.
i think that the libreoffice people should have re-joined openoffice once their main gripe (oracle) was out of the picture, which wasn't long after they split-off and released their first forked version.