Welcome to the forum. Electrum is one of the best desktop wallets that a newbie should use even people that are already long time in bitcoin, still uses this wallet.
In which country you live? You have to use an exchange for you to avail that $50 worth of bitcoin and have it transferred to your wallet. Exchange like Binance.
As he is a beginner, electrum is really a good one to use. You don't need big storage for it to install. And when it comes to exchange, yes, I will recommend also Binance. As it is pretty safe and secure dealing with this exchange especially for beginners.
And it's also being used by some with an unused laptop as your actual offline wallet. You don't connect it to the internet and you're just using it upon checking and usually connect to the web if you're going to send or generate a new wallet address.
That's your actual big hardware wallet but it's only for those that still can't avail the actual hardware wallet (ledger/trezor) as an alternative because you have it as a spare.