I’ve tried them all, I gotta say, nothing beats the flexibility of rolling your own thing; everytime you want to customize your bitcoind or any service, these packaged nodes are a nightmare (even nix-bitcoin, though that’s the best for custom builds)
Discussion
What would you both suggest for a non programmer (that's look for a slight programming learning curve),?
For a non-technical person: just download bitcoin core to your computer and use that; easiest first node. Once you are comfortable using it, you can take it from there:
This idea that one’s first node should be this crazy complex setup and stuff you need to buy is insane imo