Best os for someone new to Linux?

[Okami817]

I am fairly novice at linux myself.  However, I know a biy about computers and, more importantly, can solve problems fairly efficiently even if I don't know what's wrong immediately. Thus, my approach may not be for everyone.  Still, I decided to jump in with both feet on my first linux install.  I was (and still am) interested in computer security and decided I wanted to check out Kali Linux.  I took the trial by fire method and wiped my HDD on my only laptop over the summer (while I have a desktop, I am a college student) and Installed kali on it.  I will tell you there wil be a lot of moments of confusion and frustration, but through it I learned a lot about Kali, programming, and linux in general.  So if you are a problem solver, I'd say find a distro with the features you like and jump in.  However, I'd use a parachute if I were doing it again.  I am just impatient and overconfident.  Good Luck

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[applebucked]

I started with Linux Mint, then stayed with Crunchbang! back when it ws still called Crunchbang.

[Dr4g0n]

Depends on a few things, how much you want to learn, and how much patience you have. If you want to learn a lot, start with Arch. This is not a beginner friendly distro at all, but it will teach you a lot of things that you will use all the time with gnu/linux. If you want to just plug in and play, go with either any flavor of non-unity ubuntu, or debian.

[M1lak0]

This is the best picture I came across helping newbie choosing linux..!
I was finding a good reason to upload this!!
http://s1.postimg.org/vyjlia4jj/main_qimg_871d246490b0fdf5df52d381caa5d8b1.jpg

Hope this helps!

[Katheudo]

What helped me when choosing was using http://distrowatch.com/ to read about each different distro and what they have to offer. They also rate them along with posting updates daily.

[M1lak0]

What helped me when choosing was using http://distrowatch.com/ to read about each different distro and what they have to offer. They also rate them along with posting updates daily.

Yeah! How can we forget Distrowatch? It is an awesome portal/review website for choosing linux. Nice reviews, brief descriptions with screenshots along with Rank and  H.P.D. Nice share @Katheudo

[para]

My two cents is to go through this free Linux Foundation course which covers intro to Debian/Red Hat/OpenSUSE and play with each to figure out what you find the most comfortable.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-linux-linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-2

I learned a lot from a 5 dollar a month CentOS (you can pick other distros) VPS from somewhere like Digital Ocean setting up and hardening my own LAMP web server. Digital Ocean has a ton of tutorials for this and things like restricting root login for SSH and other sec best practices/feature set up stuff.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials

[CoyWolf]

Hi, I'm assuming that you are currently using a windoz box (Windows PC) ... or at least that's the OS you're most familiar with, suggestions above are all good, especially those recommending installing into VirtualBox before installing directly to your hard drive. VirtualBox is easy to learn and Well Worth the effort. (And it's free).

Debian (stable) or Debian based distro is what I'd recommend off the bat, there are a lot of them out there, just check Distrowatch.

Of the distros listed at the above link, you'll learn the most going with Debian itself but depending on your hardware it can be a little tricky for a newbie to set up codecs needed to get all hardware running.
You might actually  learm more yet trying to pick up Arch  or some of the other above mentioned distros but my guess you may end up without any hair before you learn how to do what you want to do using it.
If it were me learning from scratch (all over again) I'd choose SolydK. I'd suggest checking out their forum.
What the SolydXK forum lacks in quantity (it's a very small but helpful group) it makes up for in quality. It's one of the most "newbie friendly" forums I've ever been to. You'll get answers to questions fairly quickly and anyone there will do whatever it takes to help you get a problem figured out.
I suggest SolydK because the KDE desktop is going to seem more familiar if you are coming from windoz.
I like KDE desktop because it's so customizable later on when you get familiar with it.

The above is just my opinion, there are likely many pros and cons to following this advise but for what it's worth, it's based on many years of distro hopping, trying to escape the MS trap they call windoz.
I'm proud to be completely MS free for the last half a decade ... learning about the Linux kernel and what it can do is an awesome journey, one you will never regret!
Just dig in, do a ton of googling, read, read and read more on the forums of your choice, ask questions, watch videos, do as many tutorials as you can and before you know it you'll know your distro infinitely better than you ever knew windoz. (Can ya tell I'm not much of a windoz fanboy ... lol).

CW