To me Ubuntu is what Mandrake never became.
To me Ubuntu is what Mandrake never became.
Ubuntu came along and made it easy. A live bootable image to play with and see work, and an installer that just let you click through and let it do the dirty work without me having to know what I was doing. That went a long way, and IIRC was the first of its kind to take this approach.
I'd honestly still be using it today if not for snaps. I generally don't like tinkering and optimizing, much preferring to just get something working quickly and out of my way.
Might be interesting to get a hold of an old Mandrake install CD and try in QEMU.
I do remember I had some problems upgrading Mandrake: after the upgrade I just got gibberish on the screen – some X problems I guess, but I didn't have the skill to debug it at the time. I just reinstalled with FreeBSD (which I had tried before Mandrake, but I couldn't get "xfree86 -configure" to work – the second time I had learned enough from Mandrake to make that work) and didn't look much at Linux for a long time after that.
I think Linux is inherently a bit tricky/hard for a newbie, because unlike Windows or macOS it can't just assume it's going to be the only OS. Installing e.g. Windows isn't necessarily newbie-friendly either – it's just that most people never have to do that.