penguin202124 (he/him)

just works

After compiling and configuring for a few hours sure

That’s very true. However even still I don’t think beginners should use distros which are unstable until they learn Linux a bit more.

Flatpak exists and even if you don’t use them its repos are huge.

I agree. Whenever I use Arch or Arch-based distros they are always very unstable. That is fine if you like a learning curve, but if you don’t (like OP) then they probably aren’t for you.

I’d say Fedora KDE. It just works, the docs are good, it has a big community and large enough repos.

Alpine Linux. It’s pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.