I agree that arch is stupid for newbies. I was taking a poke at mint. I would never suggest that.

Alma/Rocky is what CentOS used to be.

You can install KDE on Ubuntu, but point taken on KDE (I’m not familiar with cinnamon).

I suggested basically RHEL and Debian because, like you said they are stable and relatively easy to install.

Snap is rather new to me as well. I have a recent LTS install of Ubuntu and I don’t use it. I doubt someone who’s new into Linux will touch it.

My other big concern is systemd. If you’re not familiar with Linux, systemd is a nightmare when things go wrong. But, I suppose a newbie won’t care