Concerned about privacy with hardware and other beginner uncertainties.

Practically all data collection is done by the applications you run, websites you visit and OS you rune them on. Linux Mint is a great place to start. All Linux OSs respect your privacy. Almost all apps you install on Linux you install are open source and written to guard your privacy. Which one you use won’t matter too much. Linux Mint Cinnamon is a good place to start testing. For browser you’ll want to use Firefox, Mullvad Browser and Tor Browsers in the order of sensitivity. For HW, there isn’t really anything you can do. It’s consumer HW. Buying a business laptop gives better security in general, like remote management, RAM encryption, smart card reader support and other corporate features. So if I were you I’d see if I could get away with Linux alone, it can also be a gaming focused distro like Bazzite. If not, see if you have two HDD slots on your motherboard, and install Linux on the second one. That’ll save you a lot of effort on partitioning. It’s generally much easier to compartmentalize like this, than to try to make Windows respect your privacy.