Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.
You’re right, it didn’t use to be beginner friendly. The installer has definitely gotten a lot better, and now they’re offering non-free-firmware in it; that avoids that whole issue…
Nouveau comes packaged. Most people that ditch nouveau do so because it doesn’t give them high performance metrics they expected out of their GPU, or it didn’t support multimonitor, or played poorly with RDP or any other issue which goes outside of my “watch youtube on my laptop” use case. That is, once again, deviating outside of “average user” territory. If you had problems getting any display or DE to work, that’s different, but you may find it sucks less now.
Once again overestimating beginners. Any OS installation is inherently not beginner friendly, and requires helping them, regardless of Debian/Arch/Nix/windows/Big Sierra Lion Yosemite III, Esq. Jr. MD or whatever Apple’s calling it nowadays.
I find Debians defaults during installation very beginner friendly, set and forget type stuff. It won’t use the hardware to full potential, but that’s up to advanced users to decided after they’re comfortable with the training wheels.