This is controversial I know but I do think it is really important
Fast bleeding edge - arch Fast bleeding edge more stable - manjaro or endevour OS (beginner friendly) Fast older stable - debian (beginner friendly) Fast stable - popOS (recommended for debian like OS with nividia support) Fast older stable - Linux Mint debian Fast stable - Linux Mint (ubuntu but also more bloated than pop os but may fit you needs better) stable but bloated and only good for servers - ubuntu
I would never recommend ubuntu aside from servers as their snapd socket is a fucking asshole implementation that takes longer to launch than a completly isolated container like flatpak… just how could they screw up
I would recommend arch for a beginner or debian because the endevour is only great until something goes wrong good luck debugging something you don’t know the inner workings. pop os is only really for those with nvidia gpus but if you plan on seriously daily linux than you may consider to change you GPU or just disable it in the BIOS
Now after I pissed around a billion people have a great day :-) and actually this advice doesn’t seem as stupid as you may think on 1st look.
Endeavour OS is exactly es stable as arch, and Manjaro tends to break more often than arch due to dependency issues. Debian and Arch are questionable for beginners, I would always recommend Mint as the first option for beginners. Also Mint has an easy NVIDIA setup, so I don’t think that is an advantage of pop OS compared to it. Nowadays NVIDIA is fine on Linux, especially on distros like pop OS, Mint or Aurora that makes the setup easy.
I would actually recommend Spiral Linux if somebody new wanted to go with Debian. It’s the Debian analog to Endeavor.
Spiral is debian but like lighter? well the idea was that you could use as a foss enthusiast debian they didn’t ship with any proprietary drivers until like 12 or 13
I wasn’t really thinking as of mint beeing that userfriendly on the nvidia side sorry there. but isn’t the ubuntu based mint shipping with snapd (because in this case Pop OS would be more updated than debian but less bloated than ubuntu and faster because snapd)
well my manjaro only broke after installing apt (and it did warn me it was on test machine so I knew what I was trying) but other that it never broke while using it as I “should”.
The idea behind debian and arch as beginner was that you should learn from the ground up how to properly manage your system like in case of kernel panick not looking at you popOS and knowing how to deal with it is probably better than finding it out the hard way like I did…
and well you are correct if it is for people just wanting a pc that works and doesn’t spy on you…