I might buy a brand because it's good quality (like Duluth Trading Co. pants or LL Bean coats) but IDGAF about the brand name itself. In fact, I would prefer it to be subtle or even invisible.
The more someone throws around words like "socialist" or "lib" as an insult pretty but invariably can't even define socialism or liberalism, never mind articulate what about them they dislike.
Mint would probably be a good starter distro, but since you've got an intel mac (I assume) there should be a decent number of choices out there. Having used both Mint and MacOS, I would say you probably won't have very much trouble with the interface. Plus if you get stuck, everything should be pretty well documented so getting help should be relatively easy most of the time.
If you want something more Mac-like go with the Gnome destkop when Mint asks during setup, but personally I like Cinnamon on Mint.
You can navigate anywhere: Time and space operate by the same rules pretty consistently, and even when you can't do orienteering, there's always map and compass or GPS.
Customs are easy enough to look up and in many places, they're not even that important to know: You can probably get by without knowing all the customs and if any are really important, it'll probably apparent.
Languages are different all over the place and much harder to pick up: I am only really fluent in 1 language, can sort of understand a couple others, know tiny bits of others, but most of them I do not understand and there are hundreds of them all over the planet. On top of that, knowing the language would also help you ask for directions, find out about local customs, etc.
What law? Where? How could it even be enforced on something completely decentralized?
They could go after some locally hosted instances I guess but the federated platforms as a whole do not have a "home base" and trying to enforce such a rule would be difficult if not impossible in practice (never mind that age verification was never about protecting anybody).
Consoles are gross.