I started thinking about doing a simple test. Take a handful of very different distros, perform a set of operations as a beginner would and see what the experience is like.
I very quickly realized something. There are multiple things that can make a distro good for a beginner. For example:
The onboarding experience. How easy is it to get started when you know nothing about Linux.
The availability of simple consumable information.
Ease of general use.
The maintenance experience. How easy it to keep your system running with minimal knowledge.
For example, I would say Linux Mint has a pretty poor onboarding experience for a total beginner. It bombards you with too much technical stuff right out of the gate and puts it all one page. It feels overwhelming.
However, if you took the time and went through these items one at a time and configured and understood them all it would likely increase the ease of general use and the maintenance experience.
Contrast with a different Ubuntu-based distro, Zorin OS. Zorin has a simpler, wizard style new user tour which introduces things one at a time in a simple way. It also has some interesting ease of transition features like if you download a WIndows application it asks you if you want to use it and then it installs bottles and the application inside bottles automatically. That will help you get up and running faster and give a positive initial experience. But will it leave you in a better state long-term? I am not so sure about that.
Those are very different experiences and that is just amongst a pair of Ubuntu-based distros.
Basically, I think the question of what makes a distro good for beginners or casual users is complicated.
I love Endeavour - ran it for months and months. Decided at the very beginning of this year to start a clean slate. Went with Ubuntu Studio. It has KDE + ZFS on root. Cachy has ZFS as a choice during install, but every system I put it on (2 laptops and a desktop) didn’t like it. 50% of the time I’d get dropped to a maintenance prompt, and taking a quick look at journalctl would tell me that the boot partition/drive wasn’t found. That was enough for me to ditch Cachy permanently. LOL This forum is 10x better than the ‘buntu forum, although it’s been a good while since I’ve had to do any searches there.
Like I said, I adore Endeavour - and if I ever go back to Arch, Endeavour it is. Fantastic distro.
After thinking about it all, I think I’ll go with Endeavour - both because I’m using it and because here I know from first-hand that the people on the forum here are great and helpful, and I dont know what the situation is on cachy side. With linux mint when I used it back in the day, I remeber questions there could go unanswered for days. Maybe its better now with them as well, but I see no point in gambling on that. So I’ll go with purple for my friend
Thanks to everyone for their thoughts on the subject, love the community here, as usual
Little late coming back, but I chose to come back to Endeavour. Like Ubuntu, but I began getting odd audio errors after several updates when gaming. I made the decision to come back to Endeavour OS since I’ve never had issues with this distro. I don’t know why on earth I left. To start over again just cuz it was New Years? Dumb
You could choose anything. He has to commit. People asking which distro to use over days and weeks, most like will leave linux as fast as they arrived.
).
