I’m with you. I’m a seasoned newbie, and I’m ok with config as long as I can find something to help me get through it where I’m. It completely lost and the guide isn’t 30 pages of gibberish that only makes sense to someone helping build and maintain the source/branch.
I do love the familiarity of a gui as it lets me be “lazy”.
That said I started on Ubuntu, didn’t really like gnome, tried kububtu, was meh on it. Then got to dislike cannological. I’m currently using mint, and have tried several distros as a vm. Fedora and Debian are 2 I’m trying to understand better.
That said arch and gentoo both seem like distros beyond my skill set, and I think I’d struggle with them as I don’t feel like the communities align with my needs. I feel like I should get better at stripping out what I don’t need in my distro before I start bare and build up finding only what I need.
The cool part of Linux is it’s kinda hard to go wrong with the choice as a platform. Picking the distro has been a harder choice to find what community aligns to my needs. So virtualbox, ‘kinda’ to the rescue.
I used perplexity.ai to get this which gives a couple sources you may want to consider.
According to various sources, including DistroWatch and Tecmint, the most popular Linux distributions in 2023 are: Linux Mint Manjaro Ubuntu Debian Fedora Zorin OS Solus Elementary OS Arch Linux CentOS