Shortcut
Manjaro Linux with larbs.xyz on dwm and ly as session manager. Ok nerds, now bash me. n00bs keep on reading.
Explanation
Windows is a bloated, slow, proprietary piece of spaghetti code that is spying on you. Linux is the answer. Even for normies. You can have a nice desktop, great office software and even game with Wine staging or proton.
Manjaro Linux is the best distro for people who want cutting edge technology without having a huge headache. It runs smooth on any hardware and with the pamac manager and the AUR makes installing programs so easy, your grandma could do it. As it is arch based it is relatively bloat free (is GNU bloat Luke Smith?) and even comes with an installer, guiding you comfortable towards enlightenment. I would even go as far and say Manjaro is better than Ubuntu for newbies. Ahhh and let’s not forget the almighty Arch wiki. Just writing this, i actually think Arch is a cult.
Anyway..
For beginners I would absolutely recommend installing Manjaro with the XFCE Desktop. Manjaro.org does a pretty good job on explaining how you get arch on your system. If you want to pimp your system and workflow a bit, keep on reading.
Pimp Manjaro Linux
For a visually stunning desktop manager / login screen I recommend ly . Open the pamac manager and go to the settings and enable the AUR. This opens up the world of the Arch User Repository with its many programs. Download ly from the pamac manager. Enable it by entering the following in the console.
$ sudo systemctl enable ly.service --force
Next up go to larbs.xyz and run the command to install larbs. Larbs is a pre-configured set of programs. It will also install dwm (window manager) as desktop environment. dwm’s main focus is to create an efficient workflow by controlling all your windows with the keyboard. You can easily create, move and resize your open programs across multiple desktops. larbs.xyz is documented very well and i want to give a big credit to Luke Smith the author of larbs. Also check out his YouTube channel. Let’s continue with the setup. To get pamac and many other programs working with dwm, you need to add the polkit agent to .xprofile which is usually located at ~.xprofile like this :
/usr/lib/polkit-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 & #polkit agent
Save the file and refresh dwm by pressing F2 .
All set and done. Welcome to enlightenment.