You can find some suggestions on this post - tutorials for Windows Forms[^]

I had a bad experience with localDB too, couldn't get it working.
If you can manage without a real database, and don't have lot's of data, you could use XML to store your data.
My database of choice at the moment is PostgreSQL in combination with NpgSql in C#, it is not as bloated as SQL Server, runs on different platforms, and there is even a portable version.
An alternative might be SQLite, here is a tutorial: Windows 10 Development SQLite Database[^]