IBM. The answer is IBM.

Nah. That hasn’t happened and you recommend fedora. If you were really worried about a distro going full microsoft you wouldn’t have mentioned them.

Fedora is IBM. Opensuse is okay but nothing special. Bazzite, I don’t know what that is. I guess everybody has a fringe favorite. Mine is slackware. Debian is okay if you have a bit more experience.

Ubuntu is a simple install with a slick interface and simply works. They get a lot of grief from the distro snobs but for a beginner I can think of no distro better suited.

The most unpopular here is Ubuntu. It is however very stable and has flatpak like things called snaps that everyone hates because its not called flatpak.