EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.

Fedora’s usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you’re gaming and want something that you don’t need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.

In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you’re used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.

The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don’t recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.

I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.