I’m probably just as out of the loop as you are, but if I were in your shoes I would probably be pretty comfortable with whatever built-in antivirus Windows 11 has. I had been using Microsoft AV since way back, like Windows 7 days. My wife got a laptop with W10 preinstalled and McAfee, and what I noticed was that the McAfee software was horrendously, excruciatingly slow and slowing down the machine, and it had Windows’ own AV software disabled (obviously), so I promptly uninstalled it and the machine works fine now.

13 years ago when I used to service computers at work, you needed two classes of software to keep the machines clean and safe, “antivirus” software and “malware” scanners/removers. The malware was usually what was wrong with machines I dealt with, and AV software was doing nothing about it. I use a couple well-known malware removal tools whose name I can no longer remember, but the site “bleepingcomputer” stays in my memory.

If I were to use Windows now, I’d use it much like how I use Linux… install Firefox, Steam, etc. Edit images with GIMP, have a Linux CLI handy (probably WSL; I used to use Cygwin back in the day).