Overall, can’t recommend this to a normal user.

How do you know you are not an abnormal user?

I’ve been running Fedora on a desktop for many years, and recently I finally got tired of the updates not working. Sure, it’s nice to have GUI, but if you end up using the terminal anyway to actually get stuff done, can you really say the GUI is helping a new users.

Many years before that, I also experimented with a bunch of different distributions to see if there’s anything I can recommend to a new user. Manjaro was pretty close, but you end up using the terminal anyway, because you’ll eventually run into some weirds stuff that requires terminal intervention.

Mint was slightly better, because you didn’t need the terminal quite as often and installing proprietary drivers through the GUI was easy and it actually worked. That’s why, at the time, Mint was the only distro I could recommend to just about anyone. Most people would still need some help installing the distro, but once it’s up and running Mint is likely to give you fewer headaches than other distributions.

All the other distros I’ve tried absolutely needed some terminal time every now and then. If the user needs a smoother experience with less time tweaking and hacking, Windows would be my first recommendation. However, it’s all a matter of priorities. How much do you value your free time or privacy. Are you interested technology at all. Those sorts of questions determine if Linux is a viable candidate.

You tried Ubuntu and modified Ubuntu, why not throw your net further afield than Ubuntu?

Most people don't install anything beyond office tools (and even those are switching to various cloud systems).

Also, I know it ~~is~~ was a thing, but I never had driver issues (ok, one wifi card in like 2005), I think drivers aren't really an issue anymore, maybe some proprietary stuff (fingerprint readers?).
(As a funny side note, I have a wired laptop I can't get good Win drivers, but works perfectly out of the box with at least a few distros (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian).)

I manage 3 computers for my family, all run Linux for 10+ years. And I upgrade them frequently (with my old components most of the time :)). As I don't live with any of them I don't really want issues that would prevent their use. And beyond some bigger updates (versions or largely change from X11 to Wayland) over the years there is like an issue every few years. And now they all run Tumbleweed, so so no versions (set to upade monthly for their convenience).

Oh, and the og reason for Linux was because there were always constant issues with Windows. Im not gonna install XPs every few months.

I switched my desktop to KDE Neon and I've been enjoying it. Does it have some minor issues and rough edges? Yup. But I think Windows also has some things it handles poorly that people have just learned to cope with so well they forget about them and paint it as the "perfect" OS that always "just works" and expect Linux to live up to that unrealistic standard.

When I built my Windows 10 PC I had to manually install a ton of drivers, including the network card which is the biggest pain, then go into the registry to disable a bunch of "features". Some user friendly OS. 🤷

Both: installing apps outside of their respective stores is an adventure in terminal instead of a GUI double-click. Secure boot issues. Constant prompt for password instead of a simple PIN or other form of identity verification.

Well that is actually not true. What do you want to install? Of course if you are a power user and want some special script for whatever reason yeah I can see you being forced to use the terminal, other than that there's often a DEB you can install via GUI with double klick, there are flatpaks you can install via GUI and double click and also AppImages. You can come pretty damn far with that to be honest.

Tbf I did try out Linux Mint after using Windows basically my entire life and the only issue I ran into was that setting up the desktop was a bit fucky through the inbuilt UI settings (notably panels freaking out).

Other than that, it was fine.

I switched over a year ago and have had zero issues. The lemmings will surely stick with and defend w11, while the people that are tired of being spied on for their data to be better advertised to will move to Linux and realize how bad it was on windows and not believe they didn't switch sooner.

It's obivous how Microsoft and Apple twist views on intuitive when they spend billions on advertising, disinformation, to spread their anti-libre software. Microsoft even push it in schools to infect kids minds.

If you want to be able to find help quickly, copy people who are active online and actually use GNU on their personal devices everyday, use Arch.

Have you tried popos?

One person's experience on one computer with two distros isn't particularly objective.

The app store or software center on most Linux distros are bad. I think Linux developers underestimate the importance of this part of the OS. For new users, the app store is one of the big 3 aspects of an OS: launcher, settings, app store.

Gnome settings app is easy to use, but missing a lot of controls.

The app store (software center) is just not helpful for exploring apps, and updates are always problematic.