The UI or DE (desktop environment) is actually interchangeable no matter what diatro you’re on. But KDE is kind of moving ahead as the favorite it seems. The you have Gnome, which is what vanilla Ubuntu comes with… And that has spinoffs like cinnamon that come with Mint.

A few distros have really made the user experience pretty damn simple. I personally love EndeavourOS as it seems to be the best of all worlds for me personally. But for any of my non techy friends, I suggest or personally set them up with Mint more often than not Mint is a far better experience overall than Ubuntu in my opinion. But I greatly prefer the package manager (yay) in EndeavourOS.

Not in my experience. They don’t know how to use the terminal and downloading anything shady online won’t install. No auto-updates, no bloat, nothing but what I put there. How would that not work?

Honestly Darktable works pretty damn well after you adjust to the work flow differences. I would still prefer Lightroom but after switching jobs and no longer using a company subscription for Adobe, Darktable is perfectly fine for my hobby photography.

Linux is perfect for grandparents or non tech savvy family if you set it up for them. Once it’s up and running, there isn’t much of anything they can do to break it.

This has been me as well. I switched to daily driving Linux after a week on windows 11. It hasn’t been 100% perfect but answers were so easy to find and implement. My shit works, and works well. More importantly it works exactly how I want it to.

I went with EndeavourOS

Certainly a good solution, but the vast, vast majority of people would not even begin to understand what you said here in any level, much less implement any of it themselves.