The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.

Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.

Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.

(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).