Thank you for sharing your experiences!

May I ask you what made you pursue an Arch installation in the first place?

First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.

Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:

• I absolutely love Fedora. But if it’s named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain’t the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise.
• I’m fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it’s too early to be recommended.
• I’m personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead. (I’m a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.) However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification.
• Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I’d refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.

How do the ‘offspring’ of Mandrake/Mandriva compare to one another? IIRC, there’s ALT, Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and ROSA.

I’ve also come to the understanding that what set Mandrake apart from its peers was its polish and user-friendliness. Which, harbored a great community back in the days. Currently, however, this role is fulfilled by distros like Linux Mint. Furthermore, most distros are relatively straightforward anyways. So, my other questions would be:

• Could the argument be made that Linux Mint is the actual spiritual successor to Mandrake?
• Are the Mandrake-offspring’s most compelling raison d’être that they’re Mandrake’s offspring?