Besides Debian?

Mint Debian Edition

Definitely mint for "just works", personally used it on loads of computers and haven't encountered any issues

Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case

All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷

Headless: debian

Gui: mint

Mint. It’s just good out of the box.

If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.

Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo

Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you'll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name

TempleOS

Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:

• Linux Mint^[Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean.]
• Zorin OS^[If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland.]
• CachyOS^[Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you're on very new hardware.]
• Fedora^[Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it.]

Shortlist of Only^[Technically, any of uBlue's distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you'll have an easier time finding resources for it.] recommendation for atomic distros:

• Bazzite^[This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮.]

As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I'd personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you're not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —^[I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing.] be it through their Discord, Discourse or subreddit — then simply pivot to the traditional distros.

If you want to focus primarily on gaming that can also do basic office work, check out Bazzite. If you want to do primarily basic office work that can also do gaming, check out either Bluefin or Aurora depending on whether you prefer Gnome or KDE, respectively.

All three are sister distros and are part of the immutable distros collection. Unless you actively want to tinker with your system level files, immutable distros keep everything that you need to run your computer read only. The only things you can mess up are your own files, so as long as you reboot from time to time, your computer will always be up to date and working. The result is you spend less time trying to get your computer working and more time doing whatever it is you want to be doing on it.

A lot of people will recommend Mint or Ubuntu. They're… fine, but they're not what they once were and you can do better. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to run Arch unless you are into mining your own silicon.

Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer for context

I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work... probably better than it used to but if you don't want to screw with things)

I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.

No issues with bazzite or kubuntu.

I've been very happy with CachyOS but would probably recommend Fedora.

Depends, how new is your hardware? Bleeding edge hardware is probably going to do better on a bleeding edge distro. Or at least a rolling release.

Old and crusty? Anything Debian or Ubuntu based should be more than stable.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.

If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.

I've had no issues running ZorinOS.

I can imagine a good NixOS config working pretty well. Just need to find someone's repo that has all you need already set up.

Fedora worked for me out of the box. The only software I had to install npmfusion (Nvidia driver) for a higher refresh rate and that was easy. But even without that, I had full resolution

Only reasons I moved off of Mint was that it had minor issues with NVidia gaming performance, and I ended up liking KDE Plasma better than Cinnamon. Was plenty stable, otherwise.

Can't really recommend bazzite, that I moved to, since there's several issues that have proven unsolvable for me, due to the filesystem veing immutable.

Nobara for gaming. I've had issues with multiple other distros but Nobara just works. It's based on Fedora but is preconfigured with everything needed to game right away. Every other distro I've had to fix some random issue from Steam not running (latest Fedora) to game controllers needing to be remapped. Nobara sorts this all for you. Fedora for a laptop. It seems to have the best support for a variety of weird hardware. Bazzite for TV gaming. That's basically what it's built for.

Fedora (GNOME)

Debian (stable) is my vote for reliability. Always has been. The only time Debian might not "just work" is when you have VERY new hardware (new on the market) and need the absolute newest kernel version to have the necessary drivers. In such cases, look at Fedora, Mint or Kubuntu.

I installed ZorinOS recently. For a basic user its a great distro. It is preinstalled with Brave and LibreOffice. Easy to use DE.  There would be no need to touch the terminal.

I am running Adguard Home and I was able to set that up via the App Manager. Not bad.

I needed a terminal for Docker, but most everyday users won't require that.

Anything "immutable"

• ublue family: Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin
• Fedora Atomic family: Silverblue, Kinoite, ...
• KDE Linux (experimental)
• OpenSuse MicroOS (for servers, but possible to add a desktop)
• SteamOS (limited hardware compat)

Any other answer is outdated and wrong.

Edit: holy shit the amount of mint recommendations is crazy. Stay away from mint, it sucks. It's just a less reliable version of Ubuntu. If all you like its desktop environment, that's called "Cinnamon", and it can be installed in other distros.

@PlzGivHugs not quite "just works" entirely, but I've grown more accustomed with MX Linux. Everything is pretty much just one click away tucked into the MX Tools app and you don't need lots of skills to use it. Some of the said apps might open inside a terminal, but their options are pretty well explained.