I'm using ChimeraOS after using Bazzite and running into crashes a lot. It's been about 2 months but no issues so far. I still search the web for stuff fairly often just because there's so much you can do, like set up Emudeck, modding games (I've been playing FF7 after setting up Seventh Heaven and it's been pretty fun), and I've also added a YouTube TV shortcut that runs in Firefox with uBlock for no ads. At this point I don't have any complaints about it and it really does feel like a console-like experience.

I think what matters more for a beginner is the desktop environment (DE). For someone coming from Windows I recommend using KDE Plasma for a DE. Ever since Plasma 6 it has become one of the best DE out there.

I've used:

• Mint : Solid, easy, but runs Cinnamon as a DE, which is OK and looks nice but lacks functionality for multiple displays. You can switch it to KDE Plasma but it is unofficially supported and can only run Plasma 5 which is was not a mature version IMO. It is glitchy and lacks the functionalities that makes Plasma 6 complete. Ultimately if you are using a single monitor Mint is a great choice, just stick to Cinnamon.

• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed : It runs Plasma 6 out of the box. It also allows you to easily set up BTRFS Snapshot (a solid and easy to use recovery mode should something break your install) and encryption right at the install setup. If I remember well, Mint also has that support. It was remarkably stable for a rolling release distribution but I did have to use the Snapshot rollback a few times, mostly because NVidia kept messing up its driver updates. It is also a slightly oddball distro so you might sometimes encounter something that needs a minor workaround or require slightly different commands to work, something I always found a solution to with a quick internet search. The rolling release also means there are tons of updates coming out almost every day, which gets annoying after a while. Their package manager (zypper) is also relatively slow, not supporting parallel downloads yet. They are currently testing a Slow Release version (as opposed to Tumbleweed which is the rolling release version) that would tame it down but it's not officially released yet.

• I'm now running Fedora KDE and I'm happy with it. It is easy to install and it just works. It is relatively mainstream so things work better. It is also very stable. The caveat being that the installation process doesn't include any support for easily setting up BTRFS snapshots and encrypted home folder. There is however a very solid step by step instructions video on YouTube on how to set it up and explaining what and why you are doing at every step that I used to set it up for myself. It is quite the process however and the installer has changed slightly since the video was made so there was a bit of hunting around.

They all work relatively easily with their own pros and cons.

I haven't tried it personally, but I think that Kububtu could also be an option for you . It is the KDE Plasma version of the most popular Linux distribution.

IMO as long as you don't pick something like Arch and don't mind doing a few quick web searches when you have questions it should be fine.