Anything Ubuntu-based (and thus Debian-based) may not be the best choice for brand new hardware, as it takes a bit longer for all the drivers to make it into the kernel.

My husband is using the non-LTS version of Ubuntu 25.10 with a 9060XT and has driver support and is happy with it. Mint would not support his card at this time according to our research. Bazzite was just a disaster for him – lots of issues with not sleeping and the immutable distro made it hard to do what he wanted since he uses spinning hard drives for storage and wanted them to automount as well as managing a huge music library housed on a NAS. I think some of the issues were with his older B450 motherboard despite having updated the bios to the latest stable version. I am on older hardware and love Mint. I feel at home on the Debian-based distros though. Depends on your use case and how much you’re willing to learn. Protip: Before you leave your friend alone with the system, make sure that it will do normal system things properly – enter sleep, wake from sleep, reboot, etc since these are the things that will drive an average person insane when they don’t function correctly.

I ran an older Nvidia card an currently a new amd card on Linux mint without problems. I suggest you try it out first using a live install on a USB stick.

It also doesn’t have HDR if that’s important to you. I switch into kubuntu whenever I want to watch something in HDR.