I always recommend Pop_OS! for beginners. It’s IMHO a lot closer to what Ubuntu used to be, uses apt and/or flatpaks (and no snaps), has sane defaults, a good installer, a decent company behind it, nvidia drivers included and their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment looks sick.
Also, I feel like this is a better Fedora-based distro for beginners since it’s harder to break:
Whatever you decide, make sure you’ve got a backup of any important data before you start making any partition changes. Things go wrong occasionally even when they shouldn’t.
Exactly. A backup isn’t safe until it’s tested.
I’ve been avoiding btrfs for reasons like that.
I always get a Clonezilla image made before I do any major changes, which I find takes the anxiety out of situations like this.
If XFCE feels too heavy (it probably won’t), you can try LXDE. I think XFCE is a good place to start though.
I worked help desk 20+ years ago, and it wasn’t different then.
I think what we’re seeing is simply more people who would have avoided tech now being forced to use it - badly, I might add.
3D modeling in Blender or maybe CAD of some sort.
With systemd, you set the default target to something other than a desktop environment.