Everyone's different so I'm not forcing this on anyone, I'm also not particularly recommending this to anyone, but from my personal experience, #ArchLinux or rather its derivatives like #EndeavourOS (NOT including #Manjaro) or even #SteamOS (to some degree, not apples-to-apples comparison since that OS is purposefully locked down) has actually been the most user-friendly to use and easy to maintain lol.
I think it's been 3 years or more now since I've made the switch? Not only me tho, since I've "deployed" the same setup also on our family PC, and on my wife's personal rig, and surprise, surprise.. we've faced not a single issue despite not being a sifu in #Linux wizardry. I've had many, MANY more issues/frustrations using other distros for "normies" like #PopOS, #ElementaryOS, (and Manjaro
) and the biggest hurdle on those distros has always been software installation.
It was almost always the case, and I still see it happening now based on others' accounts of their experience, that you'll very quickly encounter a case where you want to install something, it's not found on any of the distro's repos and you'd have to add a dedicated software repository purely for that one package - and many other packages, before you could install them. Even worse, sometimes you'll have to go thru the same hassle to get their dependencies too. For a "regular" user that these distros are "catered" to? will almost certainly lead to breaking the system in some way.
This should be a bit better now thanks to #Flatpak/#Flathub, but I'm still seeing people needing to do shit like download random scripts off of #GitHub just to get something like #DavinciResolve installed and running. On an Arch-like distro, the only setup really I've done on all machines is to install yay
which can be used in place of #pacman (Arch's default package manager), Flatpak, and #KDE's app store frontend, #Discover. In 99% of cases, I can install/update the Flatpak of an app, if not, it'd either be available on Arch's repos or the #AUR (which comes with yay
right out of the box) - all through the GUI.
Everything else from that point has been a breeze - and this is despite using an #NVIDIA GPU on at least 2 systems, mine esp with a much more complicated setup including multi-monitors, multi-capture cards/devices, professional audio equipment, touchpad, etc. None of us have ever encountered any Arch/distro related issues since we first started daily driving EndeavourOS - some minor issues that prop up here and there (rarely) have only been issues that face all Linux users like the transition to #Wayland and so on.
Again, this is not a rec - I'd still recommend users looking to migrate from #Windows to maybe try some of the more "mainstream" distros like #LinuxMint (+1 bonus tho if it comes with official #KDEPlasma support) since they should theoretically be more "stable" as a non-rolling release distro, but if that's not working out, something like EndeavourOS could be an option.