I also recommend to stay away from NTFS3. I had some files that i couldn’t empty from the recycle bin, they just keep reappearing.
After a while NTFS3 straight up give up, it couldn’t mount the partition due to NTFS errors. At this point NTFS3g still worked, and i moved everything to an ext4 partition.
The hottest model now is flux, and the community is gravitating toward it after the failure of stable diffusion 3.
Tooling around it is still nascent and it is very demanding (12GB+ VRAM GPU highly recommended) so you could also start with Stable Diffusion XL, fairly mature at this point.