Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so… Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.

Manjaro isn’t recommended. They made lots of weird decisions and mistakes in the past, maybe still do. Wouldn’t trust them. Endeavour or Cachy are the current recommendations for “easy Arch”. If you’re able to install and maintain vanilla Arch, I’d recommend Arch though. Cut the middleman.

I’m only a little bit familar with the TUI browsers. I’m also not sure about gemini and gopher support so you have to look that up on each project page, but I can give some general directions:

• Lynx is basically the oldest TUI browser, so probably not the best and no modern choice, but still maintained I think
• ELinks started as a fork of Links (and Links started as an alternative to Lynx, so both ELinks and Links are newer than Lynx). It has a lot of features and is actively maintained, so it’s decent I think. Probably better than Links (and Links is probably better than Lynx)
• Links2: no idea, just know that it exists. If it’s still actively maintained I would suggest comparing it to ELinks because they’re both probably similar (both related to but newer than Links))
• W3m is the one I’d recommend, it’s powerful and can be integrated more easily into other applications. For the classic TUI browsers, it probably comes down to the choice between w3m and elinks
• There’s also a modern project called Carbonyl which is essentially Chromium running in a terminal, so this one might be “better” than all of the above in terms of features and modern website compatibility. But again, it depends on what you want out of a TUI browser - if you only need something basic this is probably overkill. But I didn’t try it out.