People have made distro recomendations already, so I want to talk a bit about what makes a distro a distro: application repositories and management, update cadence, and what's installed by default. That's pretty much it. Anything else can likely be transplanted from distro to distro.
Out of the default applications by far the most important is the desktop environment. Have a look at Gnome, KDE (and others, cinnamon, etc.). Pick something you like the look of. Gnome is known to be closer to Mac styling and sentiments, including the our-way-or-the-highway philosophy, limited customisability in the name of consistency, etc.. KDE is the 'we heard you like customisation so we put customisations on your customisations' kind of environment.
Update cadence really boils down to one of two things - do you want a new OS version every few months where the distro maintainers manually release a bunch of software all tested together (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), or do you want each application released individually after it's been tested to work with everything else (Arch)? Note that the former are sometimes called 'stable' releases but not because they are less likely to crash, but because there are simply fewer updates. The latter are called 'rolling' releases.
The application management philosophies are a lot harder to nail down, especially as a newbie. You will probably just have to accept that the first distro you try will likely not be the one you settle on. For instance I started with Ubuntu until I got fed up how difficult it was to install anything not found in the main repository (a surprising amount of software): In Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu) unofficial software is fragmented across thousands of 'personal' repositories that you must manually add URLs and signing keys for, it feels very clunky. Because they are personal respositories it's easy for the owner to abandon it or just not push updates and you won't even notice until it breaks after a system update. Once I had some Linux experience under my belt I found the Arch repository style much easier to work with: One central official repository, and one 'unofficial' repository. I've heard Fedora has a similar system.
But the single most important piece of advice - just pick something. The great thing about Linux is it makes hopping distros easy: A package manager makes it trivial to export a list of installed programs so you can reinstall them on your next distro. You won't be enslaved to a distro once you decide, so just pick something and use it for a bit. Learn what you like and what you don't. Use that to decide on your next pick.
I was surviving with Ubuntu, I had my complaints but I figured 'that's just how it is' on Linux, that it was the same everywhere. I didn't even realise what I was missing until I switched.
I got a hardware upgrade at one point, so in order to get those new drivers ASAP I tried an Arch-based distro, with plans to switch back once drivers became available. I never moved back.
The two big reasons I stayed was ironically enough the lack of good Ubuntu documentation, and the PPA system. Ubuntu is used a lot, but there's not really formal documentation anywhere, only random tutorials online (most likely out of date and never updated) and people on forums talking about their problems. By contrast the Arch wiki is the gold standard of Linux documentation, there's just no comparison. Even on Ubuntu I found myself using it as a reference from time to time.
Regarding PPAs, the official Ubuntu package list is strangely small so if you're like me and find yourself needing other software, even mainstream software like Docker, you'll be faffing about with PPAs. So if you want to install Docker, instead of typing
sudo apt install docker
You instead have to type:These are the official install instructions, by the way. This is intended behaviour. The end user shouldn't have to deal with all this. This feels right out of the 90's to me.
Instead of PPAs, Arch has the Arch User Repository (AUR). Holy moly is the AUR way nicer to work with. Granted, we're not quite comparing apples to apples here since the AUR (typically) builds packages from source, but bear with me. You install an AUR package manager like
yay
(which comes preinstalled on my flavour of Arch, EndeavourOS).yay
can manage both your system and AUR packages. Installing a package (either official or AUR) looks likeyay packageNameHere
. That's it. A full system upgrade likesudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade
is a single command:yay -Syu
, a bit cryptic but much shorter. The AUR is fantastic not just for the ease of use, but for sheer breadth of packages. If you find some random project on github there's probably an AUR package for it too. Because it builds from source an AUR package is essentially just a fancy build script based on the project's own build instructions, so they're super easy to make, which means there's a lot of them.You might argue 'but building from source might fail! Packages are more reliable!', which is somewhat true. Sometimes AUR builds can fail (very rarely in my experience), but so can PPAs. Because PPAs are often made to share one random package they can become out of date easily if their maintainer forgets or simply stops updating it. By contrast AUR packages can be marked out of date by users to notify the maintainer, and/or the maintainer role can be moved to someone else if they go silent. If a PPA goes silent there's nothing you can do. Also, since an AUR package is just a fancy build script you can edit the build script yourself and get it working until the package gets an update, too. PPAs by comparison are just a black box - it's broken until it gets updated.
Moral of the story? Don't be afraid to just give something a go. Mint will always be waiting for you if you don't like it.