If you are reading my posts and are still using the proprietary spyware known as Windows I would like you to please consider your life choices and switch to linux right now. Jokes aside picking a linux distribution can be pretty difficult. I would however urge you to calm down as the decision might be easier than you think.
First of all if you are thinking of dualbooting be careful, windows is notorious for erasing linux partitions that reside on the same disk after an update. For me the opposite actually happened and I welcomed it with open arms. I decided to try linux for the first time and windows decided to update on the same day, the result? Windows blew itself up and stopped working, so I reinstalled arch on the whole system :). If you decide to dualboot I hear that it's best to do on different disks. My suggestion would of course be to throw windows out the window. (Didn't notice the pun until I read this post 2 times)
Now distros. Frankly they don't matter that much, you could choose whichever and still have a good or bad experience. Most of them are not that different. Nevertheless I still think that some distros are better suited for some. If you are a user that does not want to learn to use linux then you better stay on windows if that's impossible then the best choice is probably linux mint as it is pretty intuitive to use. I have installed mint for somebody I know that was just frustrated with windows but was not keen on learning anything new and he has been using that system without any hiccups for months now. On the other hand if you want to learn linux I would say the best choice would be Arch. Some would start screaming at this point saying that I'm insane and that beginners should start with Mint or Ubuntu. I have a different opinion however, because Arch would teach one more about linux quicker than the easy, plug and play distros would. This would of course come with the initial cost of manual installation customisation and tinkering which is a part of that learning I mentioned. I have many friends that easily installed Ubuntu yet know nothing about the system, I'm not going to say I'm an expert with linux (to be frank I feel like I know less than the average Arch user), but I know a lot more than them. Being familiar with the console and being able to follow instructions helps but both skills are easy to acquire. It took me max an hour or two to install arch linux my first time. Now I can do it far quicker.
There are a few more groups of users that have different requirements. There's the people that need a distro for a server with which I have 0 experience, I heard debian is good. There's the script kiddies and wannabe hackers that install Kali. There's Qubes, Tails and whonix for whistle-blowers or privacy conscious folk. Lastly if you want to have the experience of building your own linux system completely from scratch there's Linux from Scratch which is not appropriate as a daily driver.
There are not many characteristics that are different between distros yet those characteristics might be important for you. The main ones I can think of are compatibility with your hardware, free, libre, rolling release vs stabe and their repos. The first one is self explanatory. Free is about the price of the distro, most of them are free but some paid ones exist as well. Libre distros are distros that only have libre software, most distros are not fully libre because in their repositories you can find proprietary software. Notice you can still keep yours fully libre if you don't install anything proprietary. Rolling release distros are distros that update continuously, stable ones have a huge update every 6 months, a year or whatever period they choose. If you need the latest software it's best to use a rolling release one. Stable is better if you want your distro to break as rarely as possible. Keep in mind that rolling release ones don't break as often as they are portrayed to. Lastly each distro has different package repositories some are big, some are small, some only contain libre software, some don't. An extra difference between distros are their package managers which don't matter at all and init systems which do. Systemd is very widespread but has been criticized as a monolithic piece of software that could prove to be a single point of failure. I don't know much about runit or OpenRC but I heard good things. Some avoid systemd some don't, for that reason particular distributions might be out of the question.
You probably noticed that I never mentioned the look of the distribution, even though many newbies choose one for how it looks. The truth is that you can make pretty much any distro look the way you want it. What you need to change is the Desktop Environment or the Window Manager you use. Then change a few configs, install some additional programs you need and voila your dream rice is ready. It's really fun to do and there's a whole subreddit dedicated to ricing.
I have only ever used Arch so I can really only talk about it but I have been a part of the Linux community for a bit more than a year so I have heard some things for the various distros out there. Here's my impressions of some popular distros.