Ever since Ubuntu went all NIH with Mir and Unity, I looked for other desktops to recommend to people who want something that "just works". The wishlist includes non-breaking upgrades and not changing interface unnecessarily. There are a few modern distributions like Mint and Elementary, but none pay much attention to upgrades. Fedora Workstation it is. The tools have matured a bit since esr's wife famously wanted to…
I am a long-time Fedora user, and very fussy about Linux desktops, but would now recommend Solus over Fedora for most people: it is almost as polished, more simple to manage, faster on modern hardware, and has newer software packages whilst staying away from the bleeding edge technologies that Fedora promotes. For example, the move to Wayland is great, but if you just want a system that works, you don't want a distribution that enables it by default just yet.