Gajim on desktop (love the new ui specially workspaces) and monocles (fork of conversations) on mobile. works great for me and apart of my servers hiccups every now and then as far as the clients go, I have no problems with encryption nor voip calls on the phone.
Yeah going for a tilling window manager and expecting to see “A cross icon” to close programs is an indicator here IMO. Don’t base your image of what you want your setup to be based on what you see on youtube. If you want something simple that works out of the box I would recommend going to Gnome based system. Easy, everything you ask for it is there and looks good (been using gnome for long time, though now switched back to tilling after pretty much 10 years of gnome cause I felt I need change).
Choose simple distro while still with relatively new packages like fedora or some archlinux clone that makes things easier (can’t really advice on that front since I just use arch for like really really long time).
Go for simple stuff and dont feel preasured by your peers that you dont use that awesome tilling manager etc. Go for simple, learn the basics and setup your workflow. Once you feel like experimenting, install another one (fluxbox ftw :P), and venture a bit, while still being able to switch back to gnome (linux allows multiple different evnironments, so why not make a use of it). Most importantly have fun using it!
congrats