People have made distro recomendations already, so I want to talk a bit about what makes a distro a distro: application repositories and management, update cadence, and what’s installed by default. That’s pretty much it. Anything else can likely be transplanted from distro to distro.

Out of the default applications by far the most important is the desktop environment. Have a look at Gnome, KDE (and others, cinnamon, etc.). Pick something you like the look of. Gnome is known to be closer to Mac styling and sentiments, including the our-way-or-the-highway philosophy, limited customisability in the name of consistency, etc… KDE is the ‘we heard you like customisation so we put customisations on your customisations’ kind of environment.

Update cadence really boils down to one of two things - do you want a new OS version every few months where the distro maintainers manually release a bunch of software all tested together (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), or do you want each application released individually after it’s been tested to work with everything else (Arch)? Note that the former are sometimes called ‘stable’ releases but not because they are less likely to crash, but because there are simply fewer updates. The latter are called ‘rolling’ releases.

The application management philosophies are a lot harder to nail down, especially as a newbie. You will probably just have to accept that the first distro you try will likely not be the one you settle on. For instance I started with Ubuntu until I got fed up how difficult it was to install anything not found in the main repository (a surprising amount of software): In Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu) unofficial software is fragmented across thousands of ‘personal’ repositories that you must manually add URLs and signing keys for, it feels very clunky. Because they are personal respositories it’s easy for the owner to abandon it or just not push updates and you won’t even notice until it breaks after a system update. Once I had some Linux experience under my belt I found the Arch repository style much easier to work with: One central official repository, and one ‘unofficial’ repository. I’ve heard Fedora has a similar system.

But the single most important piece of advice - just pick something. The great thing about Linux is it makes hopping distros easy: A package manager makes it trivial to export a list of installed programs so you can reinstall them on your next distro. You won’t be enslaved to a distro once you decide, so just pick something and use it for a bit. Learn what you like and what you don’t. Use that to decide on your next pick.