Post-Snowden and post-Windows, I also started with Fedora, and, well, it honestly didn’t go all that well (this of course was my experience! If you like Fedora and it works for you, then 👍! Not here to dis the distro!). Actually, I think it had more to do with GNOME than with Fedora, so it depends on which desktop environment you’re using; when I switched DE to Cinnamon all my problems seemed to vanish into thin air. And from there, I just went straight to Mint and have been happy as a clam ever since and never looked back.
In my experience, running Windows as a VM inside Mint was overall much better than dual booting, which can really get to be a pain after a while (and also I think that the Windows partition will sometimes overwrite the Linux part so be careful!); it sounds hard, but it isn’t—if old and senile Erinaceus can do it, you can too! Always happy to provide recommendations.
For another view on installing antivirus software on Linux, see this: https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/security.html?m=1#ID1.1