If it's a server: Debian Stable or Rocky Linux (choose according to taste).

If the person can put in the work and doesn't need bleeding edge software: Debian Stable.

If the person can put in the work, the machine is in a secure environment, not going to serve anything and is a desktop system: Debian Testing.

If the person can't put the work and wants something working: Fedora.

If the person wants to dive deeper: Arch, Gentoo, LFS.

Note: Debian needs some work not because it doesn't work out of the box, but it doesn't do any customization on packages. So tailoring things according to your taste takes time. Then it becomes so customized it almost reads your mind and feels like home.

I've been A/B testing the desktop side of this. If the person doesn't mind reading a wiki page every now and then and has a few hours to set up the OS on the first day, Arch (without `archinstall`) works better for "wants something working."

The reason is that, people eventually need proprietary / old / unsupported software, and AUR often has it out of the box, and when it doesn't, at least the dependencies are already there. On the other hand, beginners (even some experienced but busy guys) might agree with a problematic `apt` plan and uninstall the desktop, and it goes downhill from there (can't repair the system because they never built it in the first place, or cannot go back to the original configurations, etc). For instance this can happen because the user tried to install a `deb` package for an older release.

That being said I can't remember seeing fedora fail this way, though the user might have to manually clone / build a dozen more git repositories to install the same unsupported software. This was a deal breaker two years ago (lack of AI help), but now it's just time consuming.

Debian had some nasty bugs in Rust packages because they do modify them.