Debian is rock solid, there are even more user-friendly distros though. In a few edge-cases it will expect you to know your way around things, however there are a lot of guides for it. Going with this will cause the growth of a mighty white beard!
Arch Linux will make you cry. If you want to learn how to fix and configure things it’s great (and their wiki arguably is the greatest of all), but their lack of QA and expectation to do that yourself often causes issues. You’ll probably cut your fingers on its bleeding edge. If you want to learn with less bleeding I’d recommend CachyOS these days. I’m certainly not saying this because my computer didn’t boot after updates multiple times. /s
HOWEVER if you have an Nvidia GPU, first off: I’m so sorry. Secondly, you absolutely (!) should use a distro that takes care of their driver for you. Their drivers are hot steaming garbage that you do not want to meddle with (many distros try their best to do it for you, but often enough it won’t work for some people). See below, Nvidia distros marked with recycling symbol.
A few other options to consider with noticeable features:
Bazzite (♻️): If you mainly play games. User-friendly, most compatible with handhelds next to CachyOS. Takes care of a lot of small things related to gaming.
Fedora: If you want modern features on a very stable system. Very good ecosystem. Basically the other stable workhorse next to Debian. Will spawn a nice hat on your head, m’lady.
OpenSuse: Also very stable, best distro for those concerned about US influence (it’s strongly EU-based). Tumbleweed arguably most stable rolling-release distro (newest system software) with a great graphical settings’ tool YaST (future unknown, unfortunately). Leap is rock-solid but slow, meant more for Office PCs and Enterprise users. After installing this you’ll suddenly start talking german.
Linux Mint: If you want things to just work with the flattest learning curve possible for former Windows victims. Helpful tips for Ubuntu usually apply and that weird software offering you a manual download for Ubuntu will just work.
ElementaryOS: Very good for users used to MacOS, probably flattest learning curve for them. Great accessibility! Not as feature rich as others (their whole desktop is made in-house, so it’s very cohesive but a lot of work for them), but what they have is very well tested.
ZorinOS (Core): Also very good. Most likely the one with the biggest software selection from the start (comes with both Snap and Flatpak pre-configured). Probably the one you’d eventually find on some school computer.
And three others interesting if you might buy new hardware soon (damn, you rich):
TuxedoOS (♻️): Default OS on devices from Tuxedo Computers (EU). Works on any machine and is a really nice distro in general.
SlimbookOS (♻️): Default OS for Slimbook (EU) devices. Also nice.
Pop_OS! (♻️): Default OS for System76 (US) devices. They’re currently developing a whole new desktop environment (Cosmic), so their normal release hangs a little bit behind. It’s okay though. Be aware it’s from a US company (not just maintainers, but commercial entity). Fucked up Linus Tech Tips once.
I can tell you from experience that it’s not a given. Not because of Mint, but because of the driver. You’re just lucky that your hardware-driver-kernel combination happened to work flawlessly.
Debian is rock solid, there are even more user-friendly distros though. In a few edge-cases it will expect you to know your way around things, however there are a lot of guides for it. Going with this will cause the growth of a mighty white beard!
Arch Linux will make you cry. If you want to learn how to fix and configure things it’s great (and their wiki arguably is the greatest of all), but their lack of QA and expectation to do that yourself often causes issues. You’ll probably cut your fingers on its bleeding edge. If you want to learn with less bleeding I’d recommend CachyOS these days. I’m certainly not saying this because my computer didn’t boot after updates multiple times. /s
HOWEVER if you have an Nvidia GPU, first off: I’m so sorry. Secondly, you absolutely (!) should use a distro that takes care of their driver for you. Their drivers are hot steaming garbage that you do not want to meddle with (many distros try their best to do it for you, but often enough it won’t work for some people). See below, Nvidia distros marked with recycling symbol.
A few other options to consider with noticeable features:
And three others interesting if you might buy new hardware soon (damn, you rich):
Mint deals with nvidia just fine
I can tell you from experience that it’s not a given. Not because of Mint, but because of the driver. You’re just lucky that your hardware-driver-kernel combination happened to work flawlessly.
Fairs