Oh man, YTMND is so old that they pre-date the use of the word meme. They were called fads.

Look at Clonezilla. It’s a specialized Linux distro that does some interesting things, including cloning.

When I tried it I found it confusing and didn’t feel like figuring it out at the time so I just did a clean install ahaha. YMMV.

You got the typical recommendations already, my advice would be to avoid most of the niche distros. I just don’t think they offer much over something that is more mainstream, especially for your first foray.

The first distro I ran for any significant length of time was Fedora.