[cowtools]

not trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.

[gw98]

Thanks for the heads up. Have dealt with snap before (and eviserated it)

[adra]

I haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite).

Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.

[beckingz]

What distro would you suggest as a user friendly alternative?

[Ruthalas]

Linux Mint has been a good, reliable option for me.

[yummypaint]

I have consistently good experiences with distros in the redhat family using MATE or other gnome2 style interface.

[MichaelCollins]

OpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.

[ksidudwbw]

this path has been partially trodden, elementaryOS. The first versions were snappy don't know now.