Anyways what are your guys favourite distros, I'm looking for something that's stable and visually appealing, so far Elementary OS is the best looking IMO, but I'm unsure of the support and rate of updates. It's not like Debian or Arch where you get updates everyday/every hour.
inb4 Ubuntu
Elementary = based on Ubuntu
Ubuntu = based on Debian
Debian's main release is a stable distro, this means packages are released less often, but more stable, the system tends to break less often from updates.Arch is a rolling release meaning you can get packages as soon as there is any update. Great risk of breaking system, but you have access to bleeding edge software. You will almost never see a distro like Arch used on a live production system e.g. your web server.
Arch is aimed at advanced users, Debian could be used by most people, Ubuntu could be used by virtually everyone.
You basically just want aesthetics, which is basically all these forked braches of distros are. They literally use the same packages, same kernel, package manager(s) but people for some reason decide they need to fork their own distro and put pretty colors and logos. The upside to this is distros like Ubuntu exist which make Linux easy to use and get into but also offer crippling downsides. The biggest one being that a distro can just stop being developed, it just dies off, it happens, a lot. The second is that you are encumbered with how the developers want you to do things. Example is the poster child for this, it gets a lot of criticism for being too bloated and doing everything for the user. Almost entirely removes the need to use the command line at all.
I've had some weird experiences with Linux in the past, shit breaking for no reason, weird errors, tinkering to get some bullshit working for hours which makes my day unproductive as shit
inb4 Ubuntu
I think this is where the problem comes in for you. While you get the nice aesthetics out of the box, all it takes is one update, file deletion (you are logged in as root on all your terminals), power interruption (you gonna get fsck'd brah), or config file mistake and it seems to put you out of commission for hours. Linux does not have a trashcan, and root can delete any file on the system, and it's gone forever, unless you really know what you're doing. It's really easy for one package to replace another and it totally changes how your system works -- 'init needs to be replaced with systemd' Y/n?'. You just want to apt-get install firefox but you have held packages, sorry brah can't install it.
I definitely recommend spending some time reading up Linux stuff, it's going to break. Have another system ready that you can use when your Linux box is acting cray. I manage a couple dozen servers, physical and cloud/virtual and the biggest thing I learned was that never just blindly update/install/test/tryshit on your PRODUCTION machine. Right now your computer is the production machine so be careful what you do on it.
I highly recommend this book -- it's free and a PDF. It has very easy to follow writing, one of the best books for giving you a solid foundation. Introduces you to a lot of the core ideas and utilities that come in handy every single day.
Paul Cobbaut - Linux Fun
http://linux-training.be/files/books/LinuxTraining.pdf
