The "Paradox" of beginner distros

I wanted to discuss something I've noticed in all my years of using Linux (about 20), and that is that the distros that are commonly recommended to beginners seem to present obstacles and roadblocks that simply aren't present in "advanced" distros.

I've never been a distrohopper, but over the years moved from Ubuntu -> Arch -> Nix. Each time the distro I'm using is a more "expert" distro than the last, but (for me) the user experience gets more straightforward each time.

The main offender by far is apt. Personally I can't stand the thing. I've never experienced so many errors on literally any other package manager. Maybe it has more to do with how maintainers use it, but constant "no package found for X distro version" and dependency conflicts seem to be a daily part of life for an apt-based distro.

Installing the packages isn't much better. How is it a user friendly experience to have to explain to a new user that their most used apps aren't in the standard repos, and you have to hunt down a bunch of external PPAs (that themselves are external points of failure) in order to find them? And that's pretty much the best case scenario. Literally just google "Install Discord on Linux Mint" and you will find that the "best" way to install is to just download the .deb and install manually. A commenter there said it best:

Works well! But it's 2025 and updates still need to be installed manually via downloaded .deb packages.

What are we doing here? And instructing users to just switch to the Snap/Flatpak version, literally introducing a completely separate package manager and packaging paradigm onto the system, is hardly making things easier to understand.

Not to mention the packages that are included are often woefully out of date. Sure, I don't need the most recent version of neofetch but when graphics drivers are 6+ months out of date, your gaming/compute experience suffers. (you'll never guess what the fix is: (hint, it's adding yet another PPA))

Another issue that I've encountered is that point-release distros tend to be more functionally unstable than actual "unstable" distros. Your fresh Ubuntu install will probably work on autopilot, so long as you literally don't touch ANYTHING on your system and just leave it stock. The second you start adding extensions, modifying the UX, etc, and a new major version drops, the entire system can just sort of fall apart, and might require a lot of knowledge to repair. Especially since these "beginner friendly" distros add so much extra configuration layered on top of the default packages, there's unexpected behavior everywhere that doesn't have an obvious origin, consequently making it easier to break by accident.

It's actually crazy how many of these issues were solved when I moved to Arch.

• Packages are actually up to date so I'm not getting constantly baited by PPA software not having features that were upstreamed years ago
• The packages in the main repos and the AUR covers 99.9% of even power-users' needs. No PPAs, no flatpaks.
• Packages have sane defaults that provide base functionality and nothing more. No more tracking down strange behavior to random files in /etc/ placed by the distro maintainers
• Frequent updates makes isolating breaking changes simpler
• pacman is simply a prettier, faster, and more reliable package manager.
• The most comprehensive Linux knowledge base (Arch Wiki) is 1:1 applicable

When I moved onto Nix a couple years back, things got even simpler (admittedly for someone with years of Linux and programming experience at this point)

• Everything on my system is clearly self documented. It's either written within my personal config, or the module my config is accessing. Want to know what settings are applied to set up GRUB? Literally just check grub.nix!
• Even more packages than Arch, and easy to find! Just hop onto https://search.nixos.org/packages to find the package, and add it into a file, and it will be automatically installed on the system.

I have been the "help me install Linux" guy in my friend group for years now. And each one at some point has come to me with a broken Ubuntu/Mint install due to the above reasons. I wipe their machine, help them click through the installer on EndeavorOS, and basically get zero questions/troubleshooting requests from that point onwards.

And of course, my goal is not to disparage the hardworking volunteers that put their time and effort into developing these projects. And they certainly have their place! My uni computer lab was running Ubuntu and that was a perfect accessible experience for novice programmers (especially since they weren't the ones maintaining the system). But how do we address these issues? It seems wrong to start beginner Linux users off on an Arch based distro, but when my goal is to minimize frustration, that's simply been the most effective method I've found.