What version of Linux for Beginners?

Hi I am 13 and want to learn Linux, I am confident with Mac OSX and Windows, but was wondering what distro would be best suited for Beginners? I just want to mess around with it and see what cool thing I can do before completely breaking the Kernel! 

Thanks 

Joseph

Ubuntu is very user friendly.  Mint is cool but I've had a lot of issues with it.  If you want to go enterprise then CentOS is awesome.

Debian has got to be the absolute best for beginners.  It is stable and runs light on system resources.  Most importantly though, while it has powerful and simple gui software installation (synaptic package manager), it also has great documentation and a large, helpful community for becoming familiar with the command line interface.

 

Ubuntu 14.04 is a mess, don't use it, it just doesn't work as it should. If you want to use the Ubuntu Core, get Xubuntu or Kubuntu, they are far superior. Xubuntu 14.04 is a pretty good choice, it's reasonably fast (not as fast as Manjaro, but pretty fast), and it's pretty stable, and uses the XFCE DE. Mint is based on Ubuntu, and inherits many of its dysfunctions.

For beginners, Manjaro is probably the best way to go for a desktop or laptop system. It supports the latest and greatest, and has very easy to use tools and the great software availability of the AUR, as it's based upon Arch linux. It comes with XFCE as main DE, which is very easy to use and highly customizable, and pretty lightweight, but there are also OpenBox and KDE mainline spins, and other DE's available as community spins.

I'm a beginner myself and I have found ubuntu 12.04 to be very user friendly and there is alot of support for it. You can pretty much google anything you want to do and find somebody who has already done it.

I second manjaro.  I'm still using it now, but I'm switching to Arch really soon.  For me my first experience with linux was out of need, it was all I could get to get this old laptop I had to work.  I tried ubuntu and it seemed a bit clunky and cumbersome, so I liked the idea of a lighter weight arch system but with some kind of beginner's convenience.  Manjaro taught me more about linux than ubuntu did, simply because it isn't trying to appeal to everyone like ubuntu, at least thats how I saw it.  Manjaro is trying to get Arch to the masses in a easier way.

Pros to Manjaro:

very helpful community, someone will know how to fix your problem

Can use the manaro repositories or the Arch repositories

Based on Arch so it is always up to date and "bleeding edge"

Pacman packet manager (good lord its soo nice)

Lightweight since it's based on Arch

 

Its really up to you, maybe try live booting a few and decide.

I recently downloaded all the latest versions of the big distros, and looking back at what I would think is the easiest for newcomers to linux would have to be Xubuntu or Manjaro. Followed by Mint. The latest release of Ubuntu was 2 steps forward, 3 steps back I reckon.

Or just try em all in a vm in windows... There are so many flavours to choose from at the end of the day.

linux mint. i started with crunchbang which is really lightweight and simple to understand. after that i switched to linux mint which was more user friendly and easy to use. my goal is a good stable setup on arch, if you also want arch it's good to stard with manjaro. the installation can be a bit hard for first timer. the archwiki is the best wiki of all linux so that's a good point for manjaro. what is your pc/laptop? if you have some ram and power you can start with virtualmachines. really easy and if you mess up just delete it and start all over again. i used ubuntu 14.04 and I really didn't enjoyed it. it was horrible. it looks good but that's all. if i search in the gnome bar i don't want to buy something on amazon you know. in my country there isn't even amazon.

if you love osx, try elementryOS. it's a really beautifull distro. 

just try as many distro's as possible. learn the difference between KDE,GNOME,XFCE etc and have fun. 

If you like Macs, then Elementary OS should be right up your ally.