I want to move away from windows because they are literally pushing ads into a paid operating system lol. So can yall recommend a beginner friendly distro?
By beginner friendly I just mean stable and less likely to break from me messing with the terminal.
Mint is always a good starting point.
Don’t use plain ubuntu, it uses snaps for a lot of stuff and it breaks many little things. Mint is based on ubuntu, but without involuntary snaps.
You should take a look at the available desktop environments: Cinnamom, XFCE and Mate for limux mint. Pick the one that looks nicest to you or cinnamon if you can’t decide.
Also check out gnome and KDE, those don’t come with mint but starting on a different distro isn’t a problem.
Anyways, the distro doesn’t matter too much. The differences apart from desktop environments (and snaps) are tiny.
I recommend Pop! OS. It’s stable and their ISOs already have GPU drivers ready to go.
Debian or Debian based distros are always my goto. Specially Linux Mint, Pop_OS, KDE Neon or plain Debian.
I agree with @nottheengineer@feddit.de. However, if you want a more basic distro, with less risk to break stuff, Debian could be better, as it also has a UI for apt (synaptic) and many DEs to choose from (Gnome, KDE, XFCE…) but apart from this less polish and custom programs which could break by customization. Note that it has much less recent software as it aims for stability rather than being up to date, which could be an advantage if you want to tinker a lot.
I recommend fedora based on my experience. You can also try any of the Ubuntu based distros as you will find more support online.
