openSUSE is more my thing, but ElementaryOS might be a nice one. I believe it's a Debian fork. When I started, I used Ubuntu MATE and found it fairly intuitive, but it depends on for friend. Ironically, I've had more issues with Fedora breaking itself than Arch or Tumbleweed, so I don't recommend or use it myself. That said, it's pretty popular anyway, so I'm probably just special
I want to say that I saw a post at some point about one of the popular instances (was it beehaw or lemmy.world?) not requiring users to answer a challenge question during signup. Does it seem like email verification is sufficient to mitigate bots or does a challenge question help too, do you think? Sopuli required both. Unverified users can apparently post?