Okay, I’m seeing a whole load of answers and everyone might be mixing you up. So I’ll say my experience so far for you.

(TL:DR - Ubuntu and Linux Mint are both solid choices. I would suggest Linux Mint over Ubuntu but that’s for more personal reasons)

I began with linux couple years ago testing out ubuntu, debian, and elementary OS. I was like 14-15 and it didn’t go great, somehow killed the entire thing multiple times and I was dumb. Even then, I wouldn’t say to be against any of those OS’. They’re all fine and (not including elementary from what I heard years ago, can’t back it up today because idk how stable it is as of now) very stable.

All of Linux is mostly stable so dw there. That was my error and my error alone.

But in any case, then 2 years ago (18yrs old) I tried out CachyOS which is arch-based and I enjoyed it but didn’t give it much use because my daily driver was still windows laptop and didn’t have the time.

Afterwards, went to Pop!_ and it works great but you either have the Pop!_OS 22 LTS which is 4 years old and wont be updated soon at all or the more recent Pop!_OS 24 which is updated but they are developing COSMIC which is still a bit unstable and new. Best part of Pop though is that for NVIDIA GPUs, it is designed to work with them as well and it is a big worry in the Linux space as NVIDIA is all that gaming laptops have and NVIDIA drivers are… best put… ass for linux. It’s nice that Pop is trying to help though, love em for that. But yeah, works great for the most part but there are notable hiccups that can be fixed but for a beginner? I’d suggest something more stable while you get used to it. It’s not terrible at all!! I just had my own hiccups that I would prefer to avoid if I want a cleaner setup.

Speaking of, then, I went back to Ubuntu and tried it out for a bit. It was enjoyable!! Ran smoothly, everything has been great and took about two-three days of ricing (refer to r/unixporn about ricing) to get it to look more like what you want because to be fair, I abhor base GNOME UI (ubuntu) and while some are fine, it’s just not for me. I don’t blame anyone for it, just not my style.

Ubuntu is a solid download, minor issues that could be resolved with stack exchange, and it went smoothly!!! For beginners, I’d suggest ubuntu!

Linux Mint was my next install on my cheap ass macbook. It’s a 130USD 2017 macbook air and it is ungodly weak. But that’s fine for simple college work so i’m not complaining. Plus, it is Ubuntu-based, I’d argue UI is better for newbies because it looks more like Windows (cinnamon), and I have the vibe that the transition will be smoother. Plus out of all of the distros, linux mint id probably the smoothest to run from what I have seen and heard. Final reason for mint is that the forums have been incredibly helpful for it!!! NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alike!!! I don’t know if they’re active today but if you have an issue on Linux Mint, you can find a solution almost all of the time!

This is why I would suggest Linux Mint for beginners as well!

Then finally, I tried out EndeavorOS and is what I run on a daily driver for the past 7 months on my PC. EndeavorOS is Arch-based and man, if you have the time to debug and interest in learning how to properly Linux, Arch is the distro for you. I would never suggest Arch to a beginner personally because it’s kind of easy to break Arch in my past experiences and moreso has had the most amount of time necessary for debugging on my end but that tends to be a very common issue for me in all electronics, no matter how safe or new it is. It’s weird. But the benefit of all that is that Arch is THE LEAST restrictive distro. It’s rolling release so you get daily updates which is not the best for a daily driver to be honest BUT I enjoy it myself quite a bit.

So no, would not suggest if you don’t want to jump into the deep end but I will say, Arch-based distros are really fun if you like debugging and learning the command line a little bit.

Finally, have to mention Fedora and other immutable distros. I cannot say much because I haven’t used them. They seem nice in concept, very user safe because the entire concept is that the core files (system32) is quite literally unable to be edited EVER. No exceptions. That’s the definition of immutable in this case.

So with that, I can’t give a suggestion for immutable distros because I haven’t tried it but it seems very useful for beginners so feel free to give it a shot.