I grew tired of shitty “Top 10 Linux distros in ${CURRENT_YEAR}” articles so I wrote a blogpost, that I would personally consider helpful when I was starting out, so I can simply link it to people when they ask my opinion on a beginner distro.
Objective criticism is welcome and encouraged.
Manjaro KDE would be my pick based on my personal experience.
I specifically mentioned Manjaro as not recommended because of all the silly stuff they did. It will most probably not break on you, but forgetting to renew your SSL certificate like 4 times in a row does not really instill confidence.
While I get why it’s not on the recommend pile I really think a rolling release distribution is a good idea for new people. I love fedora but being forced to upgrade at least once a year is not great. And I just tried to upgrade my xps which came with native Ubuntu and it bricked the system, took me 5 hours to recover it.
100%. If this article is intended for beginners to Linux, Manjaro is the only option I’d recommend. (I like Xfce, but whatever.)