Yea go with either Manjaro, which will get you used to the way things work in Archlinux giving you the option of switching in the future. Or MX Linux which offers all the easy out of box setup options that Ubuntu does but with a tried and true Debian stable branch. Both are good options.
Funny, it did for me today when i installed something and deleted it. It removed more lib files than it should have...system didnt boot anymore.
Manjaro has massive updates. Arch has updates all the time. I have acceptable bandwidth but it bothers me that I have to download stuff all the time or huge updates like in the case of Manjaro. Debian is super lightweight like Arch with far less network traffic. Linux Mint with Cinnamon is very ugly and heavy. A little lighter than Ubuntu (with Gnome) but still heavy. Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) brings together the best of both worlds (lightness and beauty). KDE is very light and beautiful. Even better would be Debian with KDE with some customizations.
Very baffling: You aren't the OP - and there's lots of good pointers in these 5 pages - so may I ask what you're apologizing for here ??
Nope, no claims at all. I'm sure you are correct. I mean, you're telling me so...yeah. It must be true. Dropping in - start reading from #1 and here i am... Edit: And kinda waste of time (in general) I might add but that is just an opinion. My opinion btw, I'm sure you have your own.
For a beginner distro, after some years I still recommend Ubuntu. Out-the-box it has the best font rendering, you don't need to mess with 3rd-party repos for multimedia, it has support for NVIDIA GPUs (including Optimus), and has the largest available software library. Fedora Workstation is also a decent choice. Personally I find dnf a bit slow when it comes to grabbing metadata, but that's not really an issue. openSUSE Tumbleweed is what I use personally for my desktop and servers. I like rolling-release, and openSUSE TW has been pretty stable the years I've been running it. My servers do unattended updates daily and I've had no problems with openSUSE. They do GNOME and KDE as first-class, and even Xfce is pretty well implemented. For a desktop environment, my recommendation goes to GNOME. It's first-party in all mainstream distros (including the 3 mentioned above), has the largest development team and backings (Ubuntu and Red Hat), has the best Wayland support by a long shot so far, and has the best usability for "non-typical" displays (4K, HiDPI, touchscreens, etc). And it generally looks good too. I see Mint recommended a good bit, but I never really understood what it did differently than Ubuntu. They've had packaging messes a while back (they do their own repacks, along with using Debian and Ubuntu packages directly), and if I recall correctly, Wine was even broken for months. I believe years ago the only real benefit was that it had a decent Cinnamon desktop environment implementation. Manjaro is an easy Arch Linux, which in itself isn't bad, but for a total beginner, I wouldn't recommend it (no particular reason, but I see no benefit to it over openSUSE Tumbleweed). And other distros like Garuda, MX, Void, Solus, or EndeavourOS are seemingly niche or just not mainstream. Not distros I'd recommend at all for beginners (their software libraries are less than Ubuntu, and they have more niche issues and less community support), but may be interesting for power-users. TLDR: Ubuntu for beginners.
People who came from windows or mac i would suggest Zorin OS 16 Core and if you want the Windows 11 theme and some othet features...go for Pro
I'd suggest going with pure debian like bullseye and installing Mate or Gnome Fallback for your Desktop Environment during install when it asks and you'll be golden, even as a beginner--just download the firmware package that covers almost everything and have it on another usb during install (that part isn't very beginner friendly but not really necessary for older hardware, more necessary for newer setups, and obscure hardware old or new). I personally hate all other desktop environments than these, other than those you can build yourself using so many other window managers and bars and docks, which are not beginner friendly. Gnome Fallback is nice and simple and a good mix between Windows and Mac familiarity, and Mate is the same just better in my opinion and way more customizable. I use the Mate core for the base for my custom desktop environment as I like the panels and the ease of theming, and the core doesn't install any crap, just the basic session, very very few apps.