Anyway, if you are looking for a noob distro, I recommend manjaro. (The AUR packages are extremely unstable, but other than that, it’s pretty competitive with what Ubuntu was 10-15 years ago.)
Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.
Now it's just adware and unstable crap, not near as bad as Ubuntu but I won't recommend Manjaro anymore.
There are several less noob friendly distributions than Arch, I'd say NixOS, Void and Alpine probably top that list. Theyre great distros but they deviate significantly from what you'd expect from mainstream Linux.
I personally have had them ship out WIP patches not meant for production, which has wasted a lot of my (volunteer) time chasing down phantom bugs in software I maintain. This has personally happened to me on at least four different occasions. A lot of other FOSS maintainers I know have similar stories.
More info: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
[0] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...
That's not enough. Some package could eventually drag it back in.
$ apt show firefox
Package: firefox
...
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd
$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd
Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -1
$Ubuntu had its place in popularising Linux but they jumped the shark a long time ago, now they are just another player jostling for their own niche.
And by server I mean that dusty NUC...
Ubuntu is just maddening.
Pop OS is nice out of the box too, but I just don't want to use Ubuntu derivatives at this point even if they've removed snaps
If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-polished ootb experience that is trivial to install. Second to PopOS for a set it and forget it experience, OpenSUSE is a rock-solid distro that does not seem to get much praise.
And guess what? It works in KUbuntu. But ubuntu is just SO slow now. ( And I couldn't install it of my current dual-boot anyway because it does NOT have option to NOT TO install new bootloader. :-/ I love Linux (lie).
Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.
Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.
I've given-up on Debian-like systems on a laptop, because the drivers were never good, just decide one last try with bare Debian, and have everything work out of the box. In my experience, Ubuntu never works, and when you suddenly get most things to work, they break down again in a week or two.
No other distro ever gave me that experience.
But whenever I see someone running Ubuntu on a server I think that there is a very real competence issue. Ubuntu should be kept as far from the server room, data centre or cloud as possible.