Distro:

• First choice: Mint Cinnamon
• If the GPU is very shitty: Elementary OS (Mint Cinnamon expects a basic level of GPU performance)
• If Mint/Elementary are too simple: Fedora KDE

Process:

• For fully switching: Obtain an external hard drive, copy the contents of the Windows partition(s) to it and install your preferred distro so that it takes over the entire computer. This is the most stable way.
• For dual booting: Buy an SSD for Linux, disconnect the Windows drive and install your distro of choice so that it takes up the entire space. Reconnect the Windows drive afterwards and set boot priorities in UEFI.

One More Tip: Don’t frontload them with information, but teach them one thing: How search for and install packages through the GUI (Mint Software Manager/Elementary Store/KDE Discover). Tell them that it’s more like a smartphone apps and downloading software from websites should be a last resort.

The best ones where basically everything works as intended are: OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, Xiaomi POCO F1

I have a OnePlus 6T and the only missing pieces are calls and camera. Both work, but not reliably yet. Everything else is pretty much there.

I tried the all-in-one server Mox two years ago and it just worked. In fact, I’m still productively using it to this day.

The spam filter could be a little better, but it does a good enough job IMO.

A true mainstream Linux distro would need guidelines like this:

• The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.
• The user is never be expected to edit a configuration file.
• There is a graphical UI for every possible action the user might want to (or have to) do.

This especially includes:

• Configuring audio devices
• Installing graphics drivers
• Updating the operating system
• Managing applications and storage space
• Connecting to networked storage
• Adjusting kernel parameters (This is neccessary on certain hardware, yet, barely any distro has a graphical UI for it.)

The only distro that comes close to this is Linux Mint, but not even Mint covers everything I just mentioned.

If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.

Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.

I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don’t handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514

I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.