Admittedly this is where the meme kind of breaks down.

I forgot about that, oops.

Historically, yes, Ubuntu has put in the most effort into being the most user-friendly, most easy-to-use distro.

However, I would argue that is not really the case anymore because as other distros (especially Mint and Pop!) have arisen for a user-friendly experience, Canonical has gradually abandoned this over the past few years in favour of being more server focused. Most of the innovation for user-friendly design just isn’t coming from Canonical anymore.

The biggest argument for Ubuntu for beginners is that there are more resources such as tutorials for it - mostly momentum.

BusyBox

They’ve been working on GIMP 3.0 for over a decade, which has non-destructive editing, as well as an upgrade to the UI toolkit (although actual UI changes are still to-do). They don’t want it to be this way, development has just been insanely slow. Mostly due to lack of developers and donations, although that has been changing recently.

They planned to have GIMP 3.0 out by May, but with so many delays it might be a few months yet.