Etc Etera
Authored Comments
As a large portion of the posts already says (with at least one wondering whether it was left out on purpose ;-) – yes, Linux Mint. Why? Because of the underlying Ubuntu/Debian basis and its large ecosystem including the arguably largest online community to get help from, and because it adds a bit to Ubuntu including an even higher level of beginner-friendliness.
It doesn't even matter that much whether you choose the Cinnamon, MATE or Xfce edition – all three come with a very similar look & feel, thanks to the Mint makers' excellent and elaborate efforts towards a consistent theming that not just looks good but actually increases usability. Especially when you routinely switch between editions, because, say, the old laptop is better served with Xfce, while the more powerful desktop PC runs Cinnamon just fine, this is going to be easier than with any other distro I so far tried.
But Linux Mint is not just very well suited for beginners, either. Being based on Ubuntu LTS and thereby also, in the end, on Debian, it not only offers their features and advantages, it also has some nice Mint-specific additions, like a built-in btrfs-based disk snapshot utility, or an easy way to switch kernel versions. I'm still far from being a Linux veteran, but I wouldn't consider myself a beginner anymore, either, and although I might add a Fedora machine some day just to get some experience with the Red Hat Linux ecosystem, too, I don't see a reason to use anything else but Mint. To sum it up, with either of its desktop environment choices and most prominently with Cinnamon it just doesn't get in my way.
The belief in meritocracy is not only false, it is bad for us (cf. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-f…, https://www.aier.org/article/meritocracy-is-a-bad-idea/, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miser…).