Good distros for beginners

Based on what i have read (including peoples experiences with them) i would recommend the following

0. CachyOS (for up to date packages and best performance)
1. Fedora (not as up to date as Arch-based distros)
2. opensuse tumbleweed

I recommend against linux mint since then you end up with out of date packages (a general problem with anything based on debian stable) but if you still want to use it linux mint debian edition 7 does seem better than linux mint 22.3

Personally i do use Arch Linux most of the time which i honestly have found easier to manage than the experience i had with linux mint and i like being able to access up to date packages (without relying on flatpaks, snaps, appimages). I also installed EndeavourOS on a laptop which was also pretty good (better than manjaro but not as good as i could have gotten via a manual arch install).

Arch Linux have made installing it easier and faster via archinstall but i have seen people report that they managed to install it via the harder manual method even though they had no prior linux experience. It's mostly about motivation and being able to follow instructions.

One downside with Arch Linux is that for a lot of packages cannot be found in the official repositories and in these cases you often end up having to use the Arch User repositories which does come with some risks since a bad actor could upload malware there (has happened previously). It's safer and easier to install stuff from the official repositories.

I would also very much avoid installing anything from the ubuntu snap store due to how much issues there has been with malware there (in large part due to lack of proper security measures).