On the matter of Ubuntu I think the issues with the OS need to be clarified. From the positive perspective, it is easy to use and just works. From the negative side, it’s become more and more bespoke over time. The Snaps being proprietary and a lot of work in the terminal to activate functions enjoyed out-of-the-box by almost all other distros is very unfriendly. And, I would suggest there are numerous other distros that “just work” but without Ubuntu’s baggage. Mint, Pop_OS!, and Fedora are all easy to install, setup, and use. Even KDE’s Neon is dirt simple to install and use and offers a great KDE experience, if you like that.
That said, however, I believe that Mint is the best distro for new users, though Fedora and Pop are close behind.
Back when, after the world didn’t end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I’ve had something running Linux since.