I'd say dual booting would be best, as much as Windows will try to break it. Then you can stay in Linux as much as you can, only switching to Windows when you need to. And then, if you're like me, you get annoyed at Windows lacking features and find alternatives that work under Linux.

For distro selection, I'd recommend Linux Mint. It just works well out of the box and most instructions online that apply to Ubuntu should work with it.