I didn’t realize OP’s question was ‘What desktop operating system would you recommend to Scott’s dad?’ I guess I need new glasses.

What you’re missing is that the question was what would you recommend to the average user.

I’m not an immutable guy, but from what I heard it’s more of a way to address programs and dependency hell, less the user modifying system code. Correct me if I am wrong

Yes. I’ve been switching non-tech people to Linux for 17 years. Ubuntu used to be the go to, but it has a steep learning curve for the average user, sucks, and has gotten consistently worse. Everyone eats their shit over Mint, and Cinnamon is nice, but I’d still field a lot of complaints. Pop! OS is awesome, but still only 90% of the way there (and also people hate the name).
Bazzite is feature complete, requires zero tinkering on their end or mine, and ‘just works’ the way people expect a modern desktop OS to. I’ve converted just under a dozen people and several of my personal machines and haven’t had an issue yet. So yes, I would recommend a young, gaming focused distribution to a non-tech person. Isn’t Steam OS also young and gaming focused? And yet it’s arguable that most non-tech people start their Linux journey there. bazzite is just an improvement on Steam OS. So yeah, I like it. I don’t understand all the ire in this thread for my answer to the question. Everyone has their opinion, I have field research.

Yes.

• In my Linux experience so far, Bazzite is the first time things have actually just worked out of the box and I haven’t had to fix a single weird issue
• It’s immutable with atomic updates, so much lower likelihood of the base system getting messed up, and it’s super easy to roll back to previous versions if something still manages to go wrong
• Updates happen fully automatically in the background, you don’t even notice it
• You don’t ever need to touch the terminal in normal usage. Everything is set up so that you can find any software a normie would need through the built-in app store. Flatpaks are great
• If you object to the gaming focus, there’s a variant that’s just for regular desktop use and doesn’t have the gaming stuff preinstalled, but otherwise comes with all the same benefits

The one thing I’ll give you is that it’s a young distro and hasn’t proven itself to be reliable and still available in the long term, but honestly, given all the other benefits, I’ll take that chance

People keep saying this but I’ve not had a single solitary issue getting Bazzite working on a myriad of older and newer devices.