edit: Fedora it is then!
He will be running the AMD 9800 X3D w/ RX 9070 XT, B850 motherboard.
I am deciding between either Fedora (probably KDE) and Bazzite (also KDE), but I’m not sure whether an atomic distro would be better/worse for a newbie.
As far as I understand, atomic distros can be easily rolled back after an update, but you are unable to use apt/dnf/etx, you need to use Flatpak, I think. Would that be limiting for the average user? Also, does Bazzite have better driver support for newer AMD hardware compared to Fedora?
Nah. That hasn’t happened and you recommend fedora. If you were really worried about a distro going full microsoft you wouldn’t have mentioned them.
If you don’t decide to even parse my answers, there is no good reason to argue further.
I have shown, that Ubuntu has done practices that go beyond subscriptions for extra Support, instead risking free users security. They have added Amazon ass once. They broke big parts of the os and made debugging harder by forcing a proprietary snap format, going against the decisions of users.