I generally have 2 recommendations for beginners who don’t want something specific, one of which is a community favorite, the other is my own favorite.

The community generally recommends Linux Mint for new users. It’s based an Ubuntu, so it had a lot of great support, but it has the enshittification of Ubuntu (snaps, tracking, pro subscription ads, etc.) removed. It’s a great, simple distro for beginners that generally works all around without tweaking. It’s basically the #1 recommendation for new users, and I gladly support that recommendation.

My personal favorite recommendation is Fedora, through I understand why there may be frustrations for those with Nvidia graphics cards who need to install their drivers. The process to do it on Fedora isn’t very complex, and can be looked up easily, but new users tend to feel intimidated by the command line, and I must admit that the installation of Nvidia drivers and media codec are more difficult than something like Linux Mint (for Fedora, this is a copyright issue, since their main sponsor is Red Hat, a private company). In every other area, I’d say Fedora is great for beginners, and provides a great way for users to get new features quickly without having to worry about any of the instabilities or quirks of something like Arch.

You couldn’t go wrong with either, but you’re certainly going to see more recommendations for Linux Mint in general (especially on Nvidia hardware).

Just stay away from Manjaro, Gentoo, and Void (there’s a long list of complex distros, but it really isn’t going to help to list them all). Gentoo and Void have their place, but are not a great place for a beginner to start. Manjaro simply has no place, just avoid it like the plague.