I would recommend Manjaro. Very beginner friendly, has access to the AUR and a great community forum where you can find the answer to any question or problem. I took the leap years back from Windows to Linux and it was one of the best things i ever did.
There is no official 1337x subreddit or discord group. Go to the 1337x official chat room (link on the front page of 1337x.to) and ask about a discord group or sub reddit and they will tell you its fake.
So after a little more research it seems indeed as mentioned in another comment Nords browser extension uses socks5. I was looking for something i could use with Mullvad as i'm trying to move away from Nord. This seems to be exactly what I was looking for https://mullvad.net/en/download/browser/extension
https://github.com/evan-buss/openbooks