Would recommend Fedora Silverblue.

If you want something that looks and behaves much like the Windows desktop environment, use Linux Mint. If you want something closer to the macOS environment, use Pop OS.

Get Ubuntu, Mint, or PopOS don't bother with the others at first as it will be more difficult to find help on forums with lesser known versions of Linux. If you have an Nvidia as your main graphics card you might have a better time with PopOS as it comes pre configured with the right drivers and everything.

Mint is a good beginner distro and has many guides available. Try LMDE

I have a blog article about this. Here is the short version:

I can tell you how not to choose a distro: what its screenshots look like or what its default desktop environment is. Many begin shopping around for a distro that suits them best, which means visiting a website like DistroWatch.com, looking at the various screen shots, and picking one that looks nice. But any Linux distro can be made to look like any other distro without too much effort, what you see in the screen shots is just the default look. Really, the the screen shots should be the least of your concerns.

So don't worry about Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, LXQt or whatever else right now, you can try all of those in good time. First, just get Linux and, worry about figuring out which apps that you can get that work best for your work flow. Almost none of the apps you use now are available in Linux, the hardest part is figuring out how to replace the apps you use daily right now.

You should choose the distribution with the best web service, and the best apps.

• Is the service reliable? Do they have a good team of people making sure the packages are always online, and making sure they are providing timely security updates?

• Do they have corporate, or non-profit, sources of funding? Do you trust the people who are running it?

• Do they have the apps you want, are the apps up to date? Do they have things you need, like word processing, presentation software, photo scrap booking, file sharing, video editing, music editing, personal organizers, video conferencing (can you install Zoom, for example?). Can you easily install Flatpaks or AppImages?

Many of the really big Linux distros all provide completely reliable service, which satisfy the above requirements, but I recommend any of the following four:

• Mint
• Fedora
• Ubuntu
• Pop!_OS

Mint and Fedora are community-run with backing from various sponsors, Ubuntu is run by the Canonical corporation, Pop!_OS is developed by the System 76 company (a medium sized US-based business that sells laptops and PCs).

Fedora is neat

If you game, and especially if you use nvidiva, I'd recommend Pop!_OS or Nobara.

Use Archlinux. Reason ? Because you will be able to say " I use Arch btw".

Btw, I use Arch.

Know that you'll probably hate what you try first. Personally I say you shouldn't use Pop_OS!, but its better than being scared of making a wrong choice. "distrohopping" is a great way to learn.

tldr: just do it

1. It doesn't really matter much which distro you choose.
2. Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won't matter anymore.
3. There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
4. Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it's not published yet. With distrobox there's no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
5. Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can't fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
6. Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.

Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.

Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type !aw KDE into ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.

Watch great channels like "the linux experiment" on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it's on peertube?

I approached Fedora workstation with little knowledge of Linux, as a former windows and Mac user. My workflows involved graphic, print, UX design, DFP, front end web dev, and some light 3D modelling. Getting acquainted with alternatives to certain apps (namely adobe suite) took some getting used to, but it's wonderful to no longer feel as if your industrial skill set is beholden to a massive, shitty company.

It was surprisingly easy to get along with. I feel like your experience in will mostly depend on your desktop environment rather than the distro itself, bear in mind that you can use any DE with any distro.

You don't really need to touch the command line anymore to get going, though I got familiar with it as I found it faster for certain tasks.

KDE plasma is probably more familiar for Windows users. I use the GNOME desktop with some plugins.

As a bonus, Fedora 39 is more performant for me in AAA gaming than windows 10/11.

1. Switch over the software you use to stuff that also works on Linux. alternativeto.net
2. Get an external SSD case if you are on a laptop, or just a second one and install it there
3. Extract your Windows License key!
4. Fedora kinoite from ublue.it

Get a cheap 1-2 tb drive and start dual-booting with whatever system you're running now. This way you can play around with different distros while retaining your current settup to fall back on!

Archcraft and Arco.

update: currently testing mini cinnamon on a VM at the moment

Looks pretty good, tho I haven't really gotten in the setup yet (really close tho!)

https://files.catbox.moe/twr0yl.png (image link dw)