Any distro you are comfortable with.

For data science, it depends on what GPU you plan to use. If it’s an Nvidia brand GPU, go with Ubuntu or Fedora. I say from personal experience that it is easier to get Nvidia drivers working on Ubuntu or Fedora than on most other distros I have tried. If it is a Radeon GPU, it will work fine on pretty much any distro at all since Radeon does a good job following Linux standard APIs for graphics card drivers, so for Radeon products I would also recommend Debian or Mint (along side Fedora and Ubuntu).

Debian got me through grad school.

Not the latest and greatest (if you run stable), but if you need the latest e.g. Julia, it’s not too bad to compile it.

I recently installed R on my Arch desktop to play with. Any Linux distro could work well if you install the right things, the distro mostly influences how they get installed afaik.

Bottles and docker could be helpful depending on software supports and your needs.

Did you know you can use distrobox and use any distros package manager? There’s no such thing as “distro x” has the most packages or is supported the best.

Use any distro you want. Atomic distros are the latest thing. Fedora silverblue or opensuse aeon

Use anything you want. All distros should support those packages, use what you’re the most comfortable with.

I personally would recommend Fedora Silverblue/ it’s other atomic variants or uBlue especially.
It’s pretty much unbreakable, modern and supports ALL distros’ package managers through Distrobox. It’s also pretty simple in my opinion, since you pretty much don’t have to worry about traditional package management.

I think you’re searching something reliable and simple, so this would be a solid choice.

Mint would be great too

Just use any distro you like and install the packages you need. Done.