when you slap gnome on top of literally any distro and put it in front of a former windows user they will use it in the exact same way and likely be perfectly fine regardless of the actual distro. if it has flatpak they'll be fine.
to new users, desktop environment is more important that distro. they dont care what package manager it has or what language it's written in they care if the UI is usable. and that's important to remember with the likely incoming new linux users. instead of recommending just distros, walk them through different DEs too. that likely matters more.
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