I'm not really a 'starter'. I started with Ubuntu (long time ago), then used Fedora, then Arch Linux and now I settled on Debian. You can install Debian very light for example without graphical desktop or a minimal one like i3. The installation holds for a long time. No need to be scared every 6 month that a major update will break something. It does not always ship bleeding-edge software. But often that's for good.

There's a graphical installer. Setup usually goes quite smooth.