Adding on to other suggestions, if you're not aware of Ventoy it's a very handy tool. Using it you can have a USB drive with several live images on it which you can choose at boot time. Great for quick testing, just drop an ISO in a folder!
Thanks for your opinion, but you don’t get to decide what I need. I wanted a simple distro that I was familiar with, so that I could teach it to someone with basic computer knowledge. Teaching how to use a terminal was outside the scope.
I maintain my own Debian-based live image. It's a general-purpose desktop, with a good amount of diagnostic/troubleshooting tools. It's quite easy to build your own using different package lists or default configuration, etc.
I've gotten good mileage out of just an Ubuntu live image. If the network is working you can install packages via apt like normal, but they include a lot of the basics already.