So far I’ve encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS . Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm and yay --noconfirm in the morning/evening and all is well.

Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I’ve needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.

I’ve got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She’s even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.

In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you’ve got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten year ago, used that for many years. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they’re doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can’t be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I’ve found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that’s the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.

Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.