Fedora if he’s not gaming.

Bazzite if he’s gaming. Or CachyOS.

I’ll give you the secret to easy linux: stick with defaults! Stick with distros aimed at whatever you’re tying to do, and you get a whole army of very experienced developers preconfiguring it all for you, for free. Instead of having to maintain breakage youself.

For example, do you want to learn all about debugging AMD drivers? Do you want to get into the intricacies of performant Proton setups, and environment variables, and kernels stuff?

You could just not, and get all that prepackaged!

Here’s just a sampling of some pre-configured stuff in my distro:

cachyos/protonplus 0.5.14-1
    A simple Wine and Proton-based compatiblity tools manager for GNOME
cachyos/protontricks 1.13.1-1
    Run Winetricks commands for Steam Play/Proton games among other common Wine features
cachyos/protonup-qt 2.14.0-1
    Install and manage Proton-GE and Luxtorpeda for Steam and Wine-GE for Lutris
cachyos/umu-launcher 1.3.0-2
    This is the Unified Launcher for Windows Games on Linux, to run Proton with fixes outside of Steam
cachyos/vkd3d-proton-mingw-git 3.0.r0.g6d97b022-1
    Fork of VKD3D. Development branches for Protons Direct3D 12 implementation

cachyos-znver4/mesa-git 26.0.0_devel.216300.02cfc61cc93-1
    an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification, git version

Do I know a thing about how Proton works? Nope. Do I know anything about maintaining an upstream AMD driver for some kind of bug fix? Absolutely not. And I don’t have to! It’s just there, in sync with the rest of my system through some maintainer’s magic.