(not the person you’re asking, but I have an opinion)
For beginners who want to learn how things work — Slackware. That distribution guarantees the beginner will soon graduate to a non-beginner status, or understand that it’s not for them. It’s a really quick result. Ubuntu et al. just make it so people stay beginners forever.
I really like the Arch trend among beginners; it doesn’t quite have the educational value of Slackware, but at least they try.
For people who just want to use a computer for normal things I’d recommend an immutable distribution that doesn’t break (Fedora Silverblue / openSUSE Aeon) and a friend who can help (ideally — with remote access). The second component is essential with any OS.
It's the simplest thing you can do, short of LFS. Packages are vanilla; the user is expected to do all configuration in the way intended by upstream. There is no dependency resolution for packages; you typically do a full install of the distro, and install any extras via the method declared by upstream. Nothing is obscured, no hands are held.
For beginners who want to learn how things work — Slackware. That distribution guarantees the beginner will soon graduate to a non-beginner status, or understand that it’s not for them. It’s a really quick result. Ubuntu et al. just make it so people stay beginners forever.
I really like the Arch trend among beginners; it doesn’t quite have the educational value of Slackware, but at least they try.
For people who just want to use a computer for normal things I’d recommend an immutable distribution that doesn’t break (Fedora Silverblue / openSUSE Aeon) and a friend who can help (ideally — with remote access). The second component is essential with any OS.