Honestly, having only seriously played around with Ubuntu a little bit a year ago, CachyOS has been nothing but smooth sailing for me. I would consider myself pretty savvy, but with the built in tools provides even a casual user should be able to get up and going.
I use paru instead of pacman, so I can get AUR packages easily, and outside of running a 4 letter command and following the prompts, that’s just about the only thing I’ve had to do in a terminal.
Arch and its variants(CachyOS, EndeavourOS, and Manjaro) are just “difficult” insofar as they usually need you to understand the basics of using the terminal, and how to look up documentation as needed.
With CachyOS, I haven’t played much with the others so I can’t speak for them, you could get away with using the GUI tools shipped by default for a long time and not have any problems.
If it works for you, that’s what matters! Difficulty is subjective, too.
Of course Win11 ran slow, the CPU the tests were done on is 6 generations behind the official cutoff. I’d rather see the results from the same experiment run on a i5-8400, which is min specs.
It’ll still be slow, but at least it won’t be an unsupported platform.
I’ve used Ninite for years on fresh installs for programs if I’m not doing enterprise stuff - all you do is pick which programs you want, it spits out an installer, and then you run it and it loads everything up, no sweat.
Generally you should be considering which desktop environment(DE) you want to use as well, cause it’s the main thing you’ll be looking at.
Mint is a good beginner, no fuss distro that runs the Cinnamon DE by default. It’s also based on Ubuntu, built on top of the normal version of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has several different options for DEs distributed as ‘flavors’ - Ubuntu itself comes with GNOME, but there’s also Kubuntu which has KDE, and multiple other options available.
If you’ve got the time and a free USB drive, I’d recommend making bootable media for a few options to try them out - both Mint and Ubuntu(as well as many other different distros) have live environments to play around in when you go to install them, and it’s worth trying out a few different DEs to see which one you like.
Cinnamon is the reason I don’t recommend Mint to people, but it’s mainly because I don’t like it. The default UI has so much wasted space it’s revolting, they tried to get the windows XP/7 feel with the app launcher and ended up with blocky, boring blank space.
Unless someone is familiar with MacOS and wants to use something similar w/ GNOME, I’ve only been recommending KDE spins or distros with it as default.