To become a debian maintainer, you need to have already built up a rapport with Debian by being a sponsored maintainer, which lets you submit packages, but they must be approved by your sponsor. Only after establishing and proving yourself can you become a full Debian package maintainer, which also requires a trusted Debian team member advocates for you to become one based on your previous work in detail. While not impervious to bad actors, this structure creates a pretty solid level of trust in the Debian repos.

In contrast, anyone can create and submit a Flatpak to Flathub, only needing to pass a volunteer review process. Critically, after an app passes the first volunteer review process, the submitter can then push updates to the flatpak without review, meaning they could initially upload a clean version of an app, then push a version with malware in an update. Personally I don't think that security model is as effective at preventing malware compared to the Debian model of slowly building trust before being given the keys.

Verified flatpaks, on the other hand, require the submitter to verify they are part of the dev team for that application to the Flathub team, which makes them pretty much as trustable as any Debian repo package, which make them a good, safe default to show for an appstore (IMO).

TempleOS

Depends, how new is your hardware? Bleeding edge hardware is probably going to do better on a bleeding edge distro. Or at least a rolling release.

Old and crusty? Anything Debian or Ubuntu based should be more than stable.

If you want to focus primarily on gaming that can also do basic office work, check out Bazzite. If you want to do primarily basic office work that can also do gaming, check out either Bluefin or Aurora depending on whether you prefer Gnome or KDE, respectively.

All three are sister distros and are part of the immutable distros collection. Unless you actively want to tinker with your system level files, immutable distros keep everything that you need to run your computer read only. The only things you can mess up are your own files, so as long as you reboot from time to time, your computer will always be up to date and working. The result is you spend less time trying to get your computer working and more time doing whatever it is you want to be doing on it.

A lot of people will recommend Mint or Ubuntu. They're… fine, but they're not what they once were and you can do better. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to run Arch unless you are into mining your own silicon.

I've been very happy with CachyOS but would probably recommend Fedora.

Freebsd? That one surprises me.

The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the "cinnamon" edition uses Ubuntu as a base. I believe they both actually use cinnamon as the DE.

It's more of a just in case because a lot of the linux community isn't like Conical lately.

With the criteria flathub uses for verification, everything in debians own repos is unverified. We're trusting the maintainer either way.

What's different between LMDE and choosing cinnamon when installing debian? Do they change anything under the hood on the debian base?

Fedora (GNOME)

No issues with bazzite or kubuntu.

Hm, that could be, I haven't tried their KDE version. Though I can't say I'd recommend that to a newbie either, as KDE in particular isn't a good option for Debian based systems since it uses a pretty old and (at least in my case) buggy version that won't receive any bug fixes or security updates until the next major Debian release (it's bad enough that the KDE devs themselves recommend avoiding KDE on Debian)

The older version of discover that comes with Debian is also pretty bad for newbies, IMHO. It is cluttered with non-relevant library files and system themes when searching for apps (I believe this was fixed in newer versions), and has no way to filter out potentially dangerous unverified flatpaks when flathub is enabled, which a newbie wouldn't know to look for. Mint's and Gnome's appstore don't show unverified flatpaks by default.

Mint Debian Edition

Wayland is replacing X11 at a rate where quality control isn't there.

I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work... probably better than it used to but if you don't want to screw with things)

Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo

Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you'll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name

what is wayland and how important is it?

Mint. It’s just good out of the box.

If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.

@ProdigalFrog isn't discover also available in the KDE version? I don't remember

Of the 10~20 distros I tested in these past ~4 years, Mint is the only one I needed to go way out of my way to break anything. Also most of what you'd need is orderly laid out in the "Start menu" (don't remember if it has a specific name on Linux), including there being a GUI-based "app store", so it's also pretty straight forward to install most day-to-day stuff.

I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.

Definitely mint for "just works", personally used it on loads of computers and haven't encountered any issues

Ehhh, I'd recommend against MX if only because they don't ship with a more approachable app-store like Linux mint does.

MX's app installer tool is more similar to Aptitude, which is to say, completely functional, but entirely text based (no screenshots, reviews of apps, etc) which isn't to say it's wrong or bad, but I'd wager it'd be offputting to the average person compared to the more image-heavy and user-friendly design of app-store that Mint or Gnome-based distros have.

Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:

• Linux Mint^[Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean.]
• Zorin OS^[If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland.]
• CachyOS^[Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you're on very new hardware.]
• Fedora^[Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it.]

Shortlist of Only^[Technically, any of uBlue's distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you'll have an easier time finding resources for it.] recommendation for atomic distros:

• Bazzite^[This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮.]

As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I'd personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you're not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —^[I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing.] be it through their Discord, Discourse or subreddit — then simply pivot to the traditional distros.

@PlzGivHugs not quite "just works" entirely, but I've grown more accustomed with MX Linux. Everything is pretty much just one click away tucked into the MX Tools app and you don't need lots of skills to use it. Some of the said apps might open inside a terminal, but their options are pretty well explained.