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> any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

The latest and greatest recommendation is now openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling yet stable). Fedora was the recommendation of 2021. Manjaro was the recommendation of 2020. Try one and see if it works on your hardware. If not, pick the next one. :)

Pop_OS!, hands down. Ubuntu without the crud, with sensible UI choices. The Mac of Linuxii.

Seconded. I am also a fan of Linux Mint for very similar reasons. Ended up recently switching from Mint to Pop, though because I like modern Gnome more than Cinnamon (sue me).

Mint was pretty much rock solid on my Dell XPS. It just worked. Pop has been a bit more exciting, but still a great distro!

I was in the same boat and switched to Fedora 6 months ago on desktop and laptop, the Cinnamon spin. It gets out of the way and up until now has just worked. No hardware issues except for the fingerprint reader.

I recently discovered ZorinOS and while I didn't use it long enough to advise it strongly, I found their philosophy of proposing a simple system well integrated interesting