I agree with this post and add one anecdotal data point.
I had installed graphene os on a pixel but after a couple months and a couple loops between lineage, stock, and graphene, I eventually settled on stock android. I have group messages with family and some of the family are on apple, some on android, and RCS only works with google messages and google services installed.
It's infuriating that I can't send RCS messages unless google allows me to. I want to go back to email or MMS. Supposedly after a month (!!) RCS group chats will fall back to MMS, but that was not my experience. Also, if you turn RCS on/off you may get kicked out of group messages [0].
I've installed two KDE+Tumbleweed machines in the past two days. One for a friend into retro gaming and the other time for older family into solitaire/youtube. KDE is an easy drop-in for Windows. If you have a better recommendation than Tumbleweed for new people, I'm open to looking into it, but so far it's been easy and I'll probably be the one to support it.
Flatpak works pretty well. I try to prioritize my distribution's repositories but some software is not packaged. I've taken the easy way out and installed the flatpak. I guess I could go and package them, but I've been too lazy so far.