I guess I gotta be the basic bitch here.

Try mint, particularly with their own DE, cinnamon. It really is a great overall experience. I've run it on something like five or six different PCs in my own home, plus two laptops. Zero issues in years. Right now, the only thing in the house that isn't running it is my audio PC, because musicbee is a pain to get running on Linux at all.

That's the only downfall for Linux currently. There's no good audio programs that are Linux native. At best, stuff like clementine and similar options are acceptable players, but they're shit at anything else.

My most recent laptop, it was as easy as popping in the usb drive, installing, and putting it to use. But that's a ThinkPad, and they're super Linux friendly. Mint has the important stuff on it to begin with, so unless you need specific programs, you'll be functional faster than with a fresh windows install. Even if you have a handful of other programs you can't live without, you aren't going to run into major issues.

Mind you, any of the other distros mentioned so far are pretty much just as plug n play too, but mint seems to play well with any hardware at all. Plus, cinnamon is such a damn nice DE