Everything in the linux world is about giving multiple choices, so the user can try and pick whatever suits best for him/her/*. DEs make a fair impact on workflows, so if you’re a designer, programmer, whatever, for sure there is one out there that meets your criteria. And if it doesn’t you can always tweak it to your will, as the crazy people in !unixporn@lemmy.ml do
I started with ubuntu-based distros (Zorin and Bodhi in particular) and I think one of the greatest challenges I faced as a new user was understanding the various different ways of installing programs: apt and apt-get, ppas, gdebi package installer, compiling from source… and more later came snaps, flatpaks and appimages. This dispersive situation makes the entry bar too high for some users. On Arch based distros instead you have the AUR which includes almost any software available on linux and with graphical installers like Pamac new users are eased in this wild world. So in the end I’d say Manjaro would be my top recomendation, it’s nice community and huge noob-friendly documentation are a plus. Probably with XFCE, because it’s intuitive and easily customizable.
Unless you kidnap each one of their kids, I doubt they will ever do. And they have all the right to keep it closed. The solution is to support the open source alternatives until they become so good we will never need proprietary software anymore. And I think this will happen way sooner that we think