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I always recommend Pop_OS! for beginners. It’s IMHO a lot closer to what Ubuntu used to be, uses apt and/or flatpaks (and no snaps), has sane defaults, a good installer, a decent company behind it, nvidia drivers included and their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment looks sick.
Also, I feel like this is a better Fedora-based distro for beginners since it’s harder to break:
Running multiple virtual machines might be one use for all that RAM. I completely agree about going with a NUC (or similar x86-64) unless power consumption is a concern. I stopped buying SBCs once Intel platforms started competing on the low end.