Pure Ubuntu was cool but is having a few technical and ethical issues these days.

PopOS (Ubuntu derivative) and Mint are probably the most user-friendly.

Fedora is a good balance between user-friendliness and cutting edge softwares out of the box. Linus Torvald himself is using this distro.

Debian is probably the most stable and universal distro out there. The app version in the repo are usually not the latest if you're using the default stable branch. However, you can use Flatpak to easily get the latest version of your apps if needed.