hey! don’t listen to all the people who are telling you to choose an “easier” distro. my first linux was gentoo. i had never really bothered to learn computers before. that was 20 years ago and i was a teenager. i’ve been using various linuxes over the years since then.

if you want something that mostly just works, don’t want to mess around with your computer, and are fine with having to reinstall every 2-3 years because updates always break, then yeah, ubuntu derivatives are fine. fedora and friends are a little bit more stable and offer a similar experience.

if you want to learn, though? then it’s 100% correct to go with something that lets you do more of the work but has an excellent manual. in that vein, arch or gentoo are the leading experience.

the advantage of these is also that they won’t break as easily as anything debian/ubuntu based will.

you will have to do a lot of reading, a lot of learning, a lot of asking people embarrassing beginner’s questions (DO join the respective IRC channels for support! they’ll love to have you), and you should keep a rescue system on a stick or CD because you have a pretty good chance to break yours.

(strongly recommend putting your /home on a separate partition if not its own drive, so you can simply unmount it and then do with your system whatever you want, without having to worry about your important files.)

as for everyone else recommending you to use a different distro: you will get this advice incessantly. whenever you ask a question or are trying to find solutions to a problem, people will swarm you to tell you to use a different distro. this is an unfortunate habit of the linux community. so my most important piece of advice is to wholeheartedly ignore the distro recommendations at all times except when you have explicitly asked for them.

you know best what your needs and wants are. the whole point of free software is to empower people to do with it whatever the fuck they want.