TL;DR: I don’t daily drive (Free)BSD because it doesn’t work with some hardware and software that I use.
I’m not an expert in the BSD’s. But I’ve tried to daily drive FreeBSD a couple of times and can speak to it for myself from that viewpoint. Most recent attempt was about a year ago.
The issues I had:
Poor WiFi support. I understand that wireless driver support is iffy and even if it does work, it has poor speeds. I tried this on my laptop and could not get WiFi to work. There was a workaround in passing wireless card through to an alpine Linux guest VM and connecting there then creating a bridge. I did get this to work, but I found it impractical.
Games (via Wine/Proton) aren’t really an option. I understand you can install steam via a Linux compatibility layer and it’s somewhat functional with workarounds. I did not try this.
Those were dealbreakers for me. But the desktop experience itself was good. I ran KDE, and it felt the same to me. if I was running it on a wired machine that wasn’t used for gaming, I think I’d be happy to use it.
LFS + twm FTW.
You seem to have a good sense of what disros are out there. I think any beginner friendly distro with wherever user friendly DE it comes with will probably be fine.
I’d say maybe stick with a deb or rpm one which most are anyway, for the compatibility point you already made. If you/they need something that’s otherwise not available in your distro’s repos, there’s probably already packages or third party repos available.
But the ask is a recommendation. I find myself generally recommending Fedora, despite not having used it myself for years. It’s easy to install, you can choose your DE, it’s stable, has a good release cadence, and is easy to upgrade and maintain.