When I was first looking into Linux I asked the only friend I knew who used it and he unironically recommended me Arch...
A year later I actually gave Arch a try, but by then he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo and I stopped asking him for advice at that point.
Gentoo obviously :
To install, easy just get this iso, with no GUI, then whip your hard drive, create partition, copy the Linux core, config your core based on the hardware technical details of every components you have and will use, compile it, add extra core drivers, compile them, add all the software you'll use to get a GUI (Desktop environment), compile them,. Now you can finally restart without usb stick! Add all the software, configure and compile them. And for every update of every software you may check the details to be sure it doesn't break your config.
Easy no? It just took you a month to get all the steps right!
Ya there's Arch. There's NixOS. There's still Slackware.
But have you heard of 9front?
9front is useless. You won't be gaming or working with it.
Mostly, you'd learn how operating systems are constructed.
Or DoomOS or DoomLinux. It's a basic linux system where DOOM is the shell.
I forked this and tried to get it running. Learned some interesting things. Still doesn't work for me. :] https://github.com/fl64/DoomLinux
I honestly don't think Arch is that bad or complicated. It's just that you have to go into it knowing that you're in for some reading, tinkering and following step by step instructions along the way. I'd start with something like Mint or Ubuntu for a first look for sure. But once you're ready to learn a bit more about how the Linux system works and is put together, Arch would straight up be my first recommendation. Even if it's something you play with on the side in a virtual machine, for me at least, starting on Arch was when my Linux experience went from clicking at things and copy pasting commands into the terminal to still copying and pasting commands lol, but actually learning why and how and what too.