I dont personally make wallet recommendations but there is more than enough information available that will help you decide.
As far as the pool goes you basically have to run it on a pool or you are throwing away money at a lottery ticket. The network is so big and it is dominated by large pools. The chance of hitting a solo block is pretty negligible.
That being said it does happen and you can improve your chance of this by joining a pool that supports solo mining.
On the other hand, if you need to make sure you generate income steady over time then selecting a pool can be a bit of a minefield with many types of payouts depending on what pool you select.
Most pools use PPS, PPS+, PPLNS,
Kano.is pool use
PPLNS Stratum BTC mining pool - N currently set as 5 x the network difficulty when the block is found.
0.9% fee paid to kano to run and work on the development of the pool.
Miner payout includes transaction fees.
CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay.
DGM - Double Geometric Method. A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk. The operator receives a portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments.
ESMPPS - Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed.
POT - Pay On Target. A high variance PPS variant that pays on the difficulty of work returned to pool rather than the difficulty of work served by pool.
PPLNS - Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
PPLNSG - Pay Per Last N Groups (or shifts). Similar to PPLNS, but shares are grouped into "shifts" which are paid as a whole.
PPS - Pay Per Share. Each submitted share is worth certain amount of BC. Since finding a block requires <current difficulty> shares on average, a PPS method with 0% fee would be 12.5 BTC divided by <current difficulty>. It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.
Prop. - Proportional. When block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how much shares each of them has found.
RSMPPS - Recent Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but system aims to prioritize the most recent miners first.
Score - Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of the current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner's score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares)
SMPPS - Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like Pay Per Share, but never pays more than the pool earns.
FPPS - Full Pay Per Share. Similar to PPS，but not only divide regular block reward (12.5 BTC for now) but also some of the transaction fees. Calculate a standard transaction fee within a certain period and distribute it to miners according to their hash power contributions in the pool. It will increase the miners' earnings by sharing some of the transaction.
