I’d say Gnome, since I’m so used to it that I feel it doesn’t get in the way of the things I’m doing.
Because that would be my aim: something that doesn’t interfere with the work I am doing.

Removed by mod

Is this my landlord?

Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go

Welcome to the team.
I hope you brought your bouncing shoes because as soon as you’ll get comfortable, you’ll start hopping a lot

I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3