Seconding mint. I’ve heard it referred to as “Ubuntu for people who don’t want to admit they’re running Ubuntu”, but the fact of the matter is that Mint has consistently been, for the last 15 years, the distro that has worked best out of the box on my daily driver laptops.

I use several distros for various purposes, but Mint is my go-to for general purpose everyday use.

Plus if you want to just check it out, the install USB can be used as a live OS without any installing anything to the disk. It probably won’t handle GPU drivers and the like, but it should be enough to just get a quick glance at what it’s about.