My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We're talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking "dissidents" so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been... entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn't work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn't make me happy, and it's not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn't reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of "mostly just works" like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
The short rant:
The longer rant:
I've been using xubuntu a bit, for guest OS in desktop VM, but I don't really know if I like it enough to recommend it. It's less rough than Arch, but so is 24 grit sandpaper.
Like others have said, there are many contenders for your use case, but mint stands out. I'm probably gonna go with mint once windows 10 stops getting updates. Mint or parrot. But TBH I don't want to daily drive parrot either.
Which version of mint then? That's really the question to ask. And if you ask me then I don't care for all the bells and whistles, I don't need animations or semi transparent windows. And when Ubuntu went with unity back in the day I walked. So I guess I want my GUI to stay the same. So I'd go with MATE or xfce.