To me, Endless OS seems to be the best fit for you; install it once and you never ever have to give it a second glance for troubleshooting or whatsoever. It achieves this through using “a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with apps installed using Flatpak.”. This translates to:

• The most important system-related files being protected from change by yourself and others.
• Ensurance that your base installation is exactly the same as the one tested and used by its developers. And thus an (in-)direct quality control and maintenance by the very people that work on it.
• As the base system is not changing beyond what is provided by the devs, installation of applications is relegated to flatpaks (see Flathub for the App Store).
  • Flatpak is a packaging format that doesn’t interact with the base system to install software; think of it like how applications are installed on your phone. With this, you can still install software you need without compromising changes to the base system.

filesystem based encryption is really cool.

Can’t agree more.

Sorry to be that guy, but you should just sit down and go over Qubes OS’ documentation. Some specific entries that might prove useful:

• How to organize your qubes
• How to install software
• How to install software in dom0
• Creating a Kali Linux TemplateVM

If you ask me, read a lot more beyond these. But if you really got no time, then at least suffice with the aforementioned.

Wish ya good luck!

Fedora absolutely does have that package.

Mandatory read on the subject for the curious (also goes over Secure Boot, Boot Guard etc):

Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)

The pursuit of Freedom led me to Linux.

Are you referring to Qubes OS? If so, what do you mean exactly with hardware support?

Whonix is an OS exclusively meant to be used within a VM; at least, until Whonix-Host is released. Therefore, I didn’t include it as it’s not actually competing within the same space; as it can be run on any of the aforementioned systems within a VM. Finally, it’s worth noting that by its own documentation, it’s desirable to do so with Qubes OS.

What are the main advantages of using this, that make it more secure?

More secure compared to your average distro? Or more secure compared to a specific set of distros? Unless, this is properly specified, this comment could become very unwieldy 😅.

Thanks in advance for specifying!

I daily drive secureblue; or, to be more precise, its bluefin-main-userns-hardened image.

“Why?”, you ask. Because security is my number one priority.

I dismiss other often mentioned hardened systems for the following reasons:

• Qubes OS; my laptop doesn’t satisfy its hardware requirements. Otherwise, this would have been my daily driver.
• Kicksecure; primary reason would be how it’s dependent on backports for security updates.
• Tails; while excellent for protection against forensics, its security model is far from impressive otherwise. It’s not really meant as a daily driver for general use anyways.
• Spectrum OS; heavily inspired by Qubes OS and NixOS, which is a big W. Unfortunately, it’s not ready yet.

Nix, the package manager, is distro-agnostic. Add Home Manager on top of it and you’re good to go; both packages and dotfiles are dealt with.

Thank you for sharing your experiences!

May I ask you what made you pursue an Arch installation in the first place?

Thank you for the reply!

Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that’s not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.

User-friendly articles

How is uBlue’s documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.

forums

Naive in a post-Discord world.

User-friendly articles and answers on forums to absolutely all more or less common issues

Based on what do you imply that uBlue’s discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.

It’s very important for a new user imo. We shouldn’t overwhelm them with choices and technical documentation.

Assumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.

choices

What choices?

If you don’t believe me

I believe there’s definitely some truth in your earlier made statements.

check some content creators. They all agree that we should just give them a popular distro like Mint or Ubuntu and let them progress as fast as they can.

Even if that’s true, I think it’s hilarious to appeal to their consensus 😂.

Recommending Fedora and especially its atomic spins without much documentation to a new user?

To be clear; while OP does mention “Fedora Silverblue” to introduce and contrast atomic distros to traditional ones, they only explicitly recommend uBlue images.

And while it’s by no means as exhaustive as the ArchWiki or Gentoo Wiki, uBlue’s documentation isn’t a slouch either; I’ve seen far worse. If possible, could you name what’s crucially missing?

First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.

Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:

• I absolutely love Fedora. But if it’s named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain’t the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise.
• I’m fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it’s too early to be recommended.
• I’m personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead. (I’m a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.) However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification.
• Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I’d refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.

How do the ‘offspring’ of Mandrake/Mandriva compare to one another? IIRC, there’s ALT, Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and ROSA.

I’ve also come to the understanding that what set Mandrake apart from its peers was its polish and user-friendliness. Which, harbored a great community back in the days. Currently, however, this role is fulfilled by distros like Linux Mint. Furthermore, most distros are relatively straightforward anyways. So, my other questions would be:

• Could the argument be made that Linux Mint is the actual spiritual successor to Mandrake?
• Are the Mandrake-offspring’s most compelling raison d’être that they’re Mandrake’s offspring?

Bazzite, ChimeraOS and LibreELEC come to mind as distros fit for HTPC/console experiences.