I switched from win11 to pop_os this week. I’ve had a good deal of linux exposure but most of that was in the '00s. As such I don’t have familiarity with any other distro in recent times, but I would not recommend people start out with pop. It feels not quite ready for prime-time yet. It would probably be perfect to try after you’ve had a bit of experience.
It’s a pretty young distro so there’s some stuff missing or not working. My main issue (beyond struggling to install it due to a wrongly setup usb that would fail at the end of the install for no discernable reason) is window snapping not working properly on monitors in portrait orientation.
But I’ve had a few times where stuff should work but didn’t with no feedback from the OS. It feels like a beta version that’s almost ready for release.