What I recommend for people with significant prior Linux/Unix/BSD experience and knowledge (and I'm talking fairly deep shell/commandline experience and knowledge of *nix system structure) and for people without are two different things, of necessity.
For example I go back about 30 years doing lots of stuff on/with Unix-like operating systems so I use a cutting-edge, experimental, very much non-mainstream Linux distro that, while awesome if you know what you're doing, is not suitable for the inexperienced.
For people without a lot of experience (i.e. most people), the usual suggestion is Linux Mint or Ubuntu. If I recall right, both are based on Debian, which is a great foundation for them (great software universe and package managers, easy graphic interfaces, not much need to use the commandline, tons of support in Internet forums, etc.)
What I recommend for people with significant prior Linux/Unix/BSD experience and knowledge (and I'm talking fairly deep shell/commandline experience and knowledge of *nix system structure) and for people without are two different things, of necessity.
For example I go back about 30 years doing lots of stuff on/with Unix-like operating systems so I use a cutting-edge, experimental, very much non-mainstream Linux distro that, while awesome if you know what you're doing, is not suitable for the inexperienced.
For people without a lot of experience (i.e. most people), the usual suggestion is Linux Mint or Ubuntu. If I recall right, both are based on Debian, which is a great foundation for them (great software universe and package managers, easy graphic interfaces, not much need to use the commandline, tons of support in Internet forums, etc.)