I’m going to get obliterated in the distro wars for recommending a Manjaro derivative, but how about Mabox? It’s more of a ricing distro, but it’s also the most beginner friendly distro I can think of that doesn’t use one of the heavier desktop environments but still keeps the floating window paradigm as the path of least resistance. I think you’d be fine, just use the AUR sparingly. https://maboxlinux.org/