Ubuntu MATE uses an extremely lightweight desktop environment and there’s even a version designed specifically for your Raspberry Pi’s ARM architecture.

With the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 series, with more than 1GB of memory, it has become much more practical to install and run Linux distributions other than the standard Raspberry Pi OS ...

And, as you're going to be installing and using Linux on your Raspberry Pi, it makes good sense to create your SD card from within a Linux environment.

NOOBS is the built-in operating system installer for Raspberry Pi. But if you already know which operating system you want to use, there's a quicker way to get your Pi up and running.