I have grown up around Linux and have had people like my dad use it near me my whole life. I even booted a fedora version once on a very old machine when I was younger as a way for my dad to teach me about Linux. Sadly I never really caught on at the time.
I am ready to really jump in now. Is there a beginners guide/pros cons comparison for different distribution of Linux? I am also curious about how well things like matlab, solidworks, and Office suit/libra office work in Linux.
For office suite, if you deal a lot with MS office formats, you might get a better experience with Onlyoffice (FOSS). You also have the option of web based office suites (Google docs, office 365 etc.)
You might like to take a look here at some alternatives to solidworks, too.
I guess they won't be as powerful as SOLIDWORKS though.
R really isn't a great replacement for matlab. I'm not as familiar with it but I think octave would be the better choice. Obviously Python as well but that's a step away from these languages.
I have taken some python classes and can see how powerful it is. When I took it though since I have taught myself Java and some C++ it was weirdly hard to understand because of how loose some of the syntax and mechanics were.
Matlab exists for Linux and is the same as on Windows. LibreOffice is a fully functioning office suit for Linux.
I can't speak to SOLIDWORKS, their website only lists a windows version. There is however some community work being done here https://github.com/cryinkfly/SOLIDWORKS-for-Linux
And it looks like they have it running.
Given that Fedora and Ubuntu are listed on that github, you should probably start with either one of those.
For a complete beginner I'd recommend Ubuntu, since it's a solid distro with huge wealth on online support available.
If you're coming from Windows, or like the windows look then I'd recommend trying the cinnamon flavor of Ubuntu (or straight up Linux Mint which is also Ubuntu based).
More important than the distro you choose is the DE (desktop environment), this will define how you will interact with your system and applications, and choosing a DE that you did not like can even make you give up if you do not have a strong will to move on.
Here are a few more arguments:
https://youtu.be/DJ_4hfuidG0
Maybe this video can help (the comparison starts at 4:44, just ignore the part that "gnome is almost a standard" This is not actually true, all DEs from the video below are available in most distros and are well supported):
https://youtu.be/IiOt4waFqhQ
But do not be afraid, you can change easily your DE once you installed your system, and even can have multiple DEs installed at the same time, you will need to choose them when you log in.