Use YouTube revanced. It’s an app that patches the official YouTube apk. Basically you provide the version of the apk it requires (the patcher will tell you), select which patches you want (you can put all of them and disable what you don’t need in the settings later) and if will create a new apk without ads that you can install
I would say:
But you could also go for any more up to date debian-based distro, like Pop_OS or even Ubuntu, they might be easier for a newbie user. Fedora and OpenSUSE will be more up to date though.
If you do use Ubuntu, don’t stick to just LTS versions, use the last version available (which right now happens to be an LTS version). The “extra support” it offers is not something desktop users care about, it’s outweighted by the benefits of more updated software.