edit: Fedora it is then!
He will be running the AMD 9800 X3D w/ RX 9070 XT, B850 motherboard.
I am deciding between either Fedora (probably KDE) and Bazzite (also KDE), but I’m not sure whether an atomic distro would be better/worse for a newbie.
As far as I understand, atomic distros can be easily rolled back after an update, but you are unable to use apt/dnf/etx, you need to use Flatpak, I think. Would that be limiting for the average user? Also, does Bazzite have better driver support for newer AMD hardware compared to Fedora?
My PC is the same build and I run Kinoite (also KDE). The only major issue I ran into was figuring out how to get a Windows VM up and running for work stuff, but I eventually got it and now that’s working smoothly, too.
The majority of what most people run is available as a Flatpak container, but there’s also rpm-ostree if you want to install packages, which functions similarly to dnf. And you still have rpm if you want to install something manually.
As far as AMD driver support goes, everything’s been working great. Can’t say how it compares to base Fedora, though, but it’s probably similar.
The Bazzite docs really recommend against rpm-ostree, saying it could break stuff and such
I don’t use it as a primary, but for me it’s been fine for some one-off tools.