My recommendation: LinuxMint with the Cinnamon desktop.

1. planned usage: should have all the software you described
2. default settings: has intuitive default settings, especially if you are used to windows
3. configuration: has lots of cool settings for tweaking your desktop - really fun stuff
4. low maintenance: it just works. You never really have to do anything
5. stability: based on Ubuntu and Debian and uses LTS releases (unlike some distros who use a rolling release model)
6. automatic updates: don’t know if that’s enabled by default but it’s super easy to turn on/off

It does have some applications installed by default but that’s very common and you can always just go into the software center and uninstall stuff. Apart from that, everything else seems to fit.

I used flatpak+flathub to distribute a program I wrote. My program and all the updates were not reviewed in any way. I can even change permissions and the user doesn’t get a warning. I don’t trust flatpak or flathub. I also don’t trust snaps or AppImages. I only trust packages from linux distributions official repositories

Thank you for the links. I am curious about how this stuff works