When you start you go with mint and then you either arch if you want high maintain rolling updates or debian if you want stable distro thats just as good as arch! (Debian hates nvidia drivers for some reson so you need to update those if you have nvidia gpu tho).

You think choosing your Linux distro is bad, imagine having to choose your electricity, water, internet, phone, banking, and insurance provider as well as your local councillor, workplace, school, career, entertainment, childcare, car, house, food, etc.

This “love choice, hate choosing” is a really valuable thing to understand.

Ventoy and go, try a bunch.

But the correct answer is Mint with XFCE

The wrong assumption is that you have to pick the best of all possible everything the first time. People agonize less about choosing a type of car to spend $30,000 on knowing that if you sell it used its instantly worth 5000 less.

Meanwhile you can switch everything about your computer in 2 hours for free.

For first-timers: pick at random and use it until it annoys you. Then you can make an informed decision second (third, fourth, …, nth) time around

make it without AI and try again

Just ask your favourite slop generator to shit a suggestion for you, it already replaced your ability to draw stick figures, something every person knows hownto do by the age of 7.
Or better yet, google a list of active distros and throw a fucking dice. Same amount of precision and intelligence, less wasted electricity and water.

AI trash aside, I think the default recommendation for newbies should be Linux Mint with Cinnamon environment. It’s familiar, simple, and fully functional. Lots of people use it as their go-to for general purposes, myself included.

OP is posting AI slop and plagiarizing other people’s work. Lead image seems a cyanide and happiness cartoon, but it’s a blatent ripoff, and they watermarked it with their own username to boot. And no communication out transparency around any of that as well

Ubuntu and Mint have default DEs, and they’re literally the only two popular recommendations for newbies

Holy sneaky AI image, Batman!

I’m a Linux > Ubuntu > Gnome type of girl. I don’t know what any of that means but those are how I use my linux.

That’s why BSD > Linux

Working pc with low effort? Just use Linux Mint. Is basically an Ubuntu without bloat and less strict on packages. Also cinnamon as desktop is both super windows-familiar and customizable with close to no need for the terminal.

Gaming pc fast and updated? Catchy OS with a KDE plasma desktop. So you can say to other “I use Arch (derivate) btw”.

I love Lemmy. I hate AI posters.