Ah dual booting with Windows can cause some issues, like with Bitlocker, Fast Boot stopping WiFi from working in Linux, or a rogue update causing Grub to fail.
Is Google "much loathed"? It's thanks to Google that the world's largest browser engine and operating system are both open source. Yes we can list bad things they've done but they've also done a lot of good.
That's weird. Ubuntu has two tracks, the standard that gets updated every six months and the LTS track that updates every two years. I think the developers recommend the LTS versions, and it's the version I see that tends to get better corporate support. But even on LTS you can find some oddities sometimes I suppose.
If it has an AMD GPU you can just install it now, no waiting. But it's not good at much more than just playing games, if you want a more general purpose machine I'd install something mainstream like Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora.
They don't take significantly more RAM