I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that
That's what I figured, I would be very annoyed to have to use images for software I would simply do an apt install for in other distros, so I'll leave out Bazzite from my options definitely
Nobara does seem pretty cool