Frankly, this question is a very personal choice. Any distribution you choose will really just be the closest base point to get you to your "perfext" Linux inst

Frankly, this question is a very personal choice. Any distribution you choose will really just be the closest base point to get you to your "perfext" Linux installation. After just a few weeks, even using the same distro, everyone's installation is customized to its user like a glovesl. Some start with more more comfortable distros than others. Something like Ubuntu will give you a very stock, GUI heavy, "beginner/I don't want to think about my OS" operating system. From there, you get into Debian, a much more "pick and choose distro" than Ubuntu, but still with great support and stable packages. After that, maybe into Arch, a rolling release distro with grear, always-up-to-date, system with a very minimalist and well designed base install. After that, Gentoo, a hand crafted, labor intensive distro that will be completely bespoke to you. Some never move on from Ubuntu, some never make it to Gentoo. AND THAT'S _OKAY_. It's about what YOU are comfortable with. As you grow and become more familiar with the CLI and Linux, you'll want to take more control of what you install and I think you'll start to appreciate simplicity and purity over "initial ease of use". You might even consider trying out different window managers like KDE, i3 (my current love affair), or awesome wm. At that point in your Linux journey, you'll actually have some intuition about how a window manager is different from your distro and how most window managers are built on top of X server. You'll have your own hand rolled .Bashrc. You'll know what you _want_ from your OS. Personally, that's where I am now. I've been running Arch for 2 years now and made the switch from GNOME to i3 about 6 months ago. My advice is not to try the most highly recommended distro, or the most "barebones" but simply begin with so.thing very easy like Ubuntu. You might quickly hit some frustrations and identify things that you would like your distro of choice to better. At that point look elsewhere. Migrate and give that some time. Don't just jump onto the "perfect developer's distro", ease into the easiest and most comforting distro for you "where you are now".