Linux mint (Cinnamon is my fav). You can never go wrong.

Maybe

TuxedoOS has been seamless, runs KDE, and all updates are checked for compatibility

I dare you to install Gentoo

Debian all day...

All these shiny new distros promising to make things easier and better... But nothing is easier and better than 30 years of rock solid stability and support.

Depending on how new the laptop is, it might not work on debian stable. Check your compatibility

From personal experience with a new laptop, the intel meteor lake platform didnt work well with debian stable

Mint, Fedora

Run KDE if you consistently game, otherwise Gnome is good since you can leave every setting after setup with it

Debian is one of my favorites and one of the easiest to use if you are new. i haven't tried mint but they are very similar.

FedoraKDE, or Mint.

Either way you'll probably be able to search and find answers to your problems (and answers for ubuntu may work), and with mint you know your friend can possibly help if need be, and they work well.

This is quite a rabbit hole you are getting yourself into, but to keep it short and relatively simple, you need to figure out something very important beforehand:

• Do you want a rolling release or a stable distro?

I'm assuming that, you are not yet familiar with these terms, so let's go with the stable distros.

You have a lot of options here, most of them will all be based of Ubuntu, which is based in Debian, so let me drop a few generally good suggestions in no particular order:

• Linux Mint
• MX Linux
• ZorinOS
• PopOS
• Fedora, (This one is not a stable distro, but you should be good with it)

Either of these is a good starting point. If down the road you feel like they stop fitting your needs, start exploring the big three, (Debian, Fedora and Arch Linux).

Don't want to think about your OS? Install Aurora. The hardest decision will be choosing your password. Install instructions are identical to any other Fedora installation. Auto updates to everything, never breaking system with bleeding edge software all the time. Superb documentation, zero maintenance, windows like desktop experience but better. That's all.

Been meaning to try CachyOS. It's a gamer friendly Arch based distro. Might be worth looking at. Distro doesn't really matter much at all. Desktop environment does. If you want HDR support KDE and GNOME are your only bet.

Edit: Kubuntu would probably be the easiest to use and setup distro that has HDR support.

Ubuntu. There are mixes of it but out of the box Ubuntu is about as straightforward a dist to install as possible and it is well supported.

That said "new laptop" and Linux are not always a match made in heaven. You might try it from a boot stick and confirm that things like the GPU, touch screen, touchpad, fingerprint reader, USB C / Lightning all work properly.