LFS + twm FTW.

You seem to have a good sense of what disros are out there. I think any beginner friendly distro with wherever user friendly DE it comes with will probably be fine.

I’d say maybe stick with a deb or rpm one which most are anyway, for the compatibility point you already made. If you/they need something that’s otherwise not available in your distro’s repos, there’s probably already packages or third party repos available.

But the ask is a recommendation. I find myself generally recommending Fedora, despite not having used it myself for years. It’s easy to install, you can choose your DE, it’s stable, has a good release cadence, and is easy to upgrade and maintain.

I’ve been blocking communities that post news. It’s a bit of a heavy lift at first because there are quite a lot. But my all feed is now a fairly pleasant place and there’s still a decent amount of content. I don’t expect it’ll be much effort to maintain, either.