The distro part is actually kinda easy. In my mind there's only a few distros that should ever be considered by a new user. Fedora, or Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS. The last three are effectively the same thing under the hood and all of them will do the job.

The real hard question is which desktop environment. Plasma is generally my go to suggestion. I feel it follows a tried and true paradigm for UI and UX. It's incredibly polished, fast, and very full featured. The one that really sticks out as odd to me is gnome and is the one that I would never recommend. I wouldn't discourage, just not recommend.