Linux

@valentino All of them; they're mostly the same! /jk But seriously try another OS: OpenBSD, Haiku, Serenity, Plan 9...

I think Elementary OS a bit. It's not bad necessarily (although I do think they're a bit over-aggressive about monetization which I don't really like) but I always see people talk it up about how functional and beautiful-looking it is, whereas when I tried it it just seemed like a pretty standard Ubuntu-based distro themed to look like a Mac.

Unless there's something amazing in there that I just didn't catch on to, but it just didn't really click for me.

Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn't have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.

Windows

I really really enjoyed this video. Matt is great, every video of his is a different type of gold, great content.

As for the distros:

Mint (my first distro, favourite beginner distro; when I tried using it a few months ago, however, the facade was stripped: it's not good for my use case anymore and that's fine)

Zorin

All the *buntus, but especially Kubuntu for some reason

Arch (I say that as a bit of an Arch fanboy)

NixOS (I say that as a NixOS user)

Most, if not all of the Arch-based distros (literally just Arch with an installer, some preinstalled stuff, and extra repos, except Manjaro which is a failure, but that's a different topic)

I haven't really heard anyone speak highly on Elementary OS or Solus so I don't exactly agree about them being overrated.

Extra (that will piss off a lot of power users, also rant and story time): Void Linux. It just feels like it's weird for the sake of being weird. And a lot of times I tried to get river working, to no avail, and that is literally my greatest issue with Void, as well as the fa t it tries to be like Arch, but more stable. Don't het me wrong, that's literally the type of distro I want to run, but I just find it to be a bit of a mess for some reason. Arch has always besn smooth sailing, with Archinstall or via a manula install, while with Void I felt like I was fighting the system to make it do what I want it to. So yeah, Void. Love the "Enter the Void" marketing, and the idea, as well as the logo. The installer was fine, xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated, and I had a hard time getting river and sddm working properly. Runit was weird but I could get used to it if it actually worked well. The main issue I was having was that at first, the river session did not appear. I fixed that, but then I couldn't het sddm enabled on Void because it didn't have a service file for runit! Cue me trying to get that set up for an hour or two, until I gave up and moved on to Tumbleweed (where zypper broke on me and I had to depend on Yast to manage packages, sighs). And then I gave up on Tumbleweed, went to Arch, where things were ok, but I didn't really want a rolling relese so when NixOS 23.05 launched, I jumped ship and have been there since. It's a bit crazy to me that this system has been on my laptop since the start of June, but it does all of what I need in a good way, and that's without even taking advantage of the full capabilities of NixOS. I only use Home manaher to set my gtk and icon themes, and have not even touched flakes yet.

Debian Hurd

Arch