not trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.
I haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite).
Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.
Thanks. Pop_OS! is a candidate for testing here already if Ubuntu doesn't work out. I picked Ubuntu as a first point because I grabbed a Lenovo Neo 50s desktop and that supports it out of the box. That will set expectation for hardware compatibility and issues for other distributions or variants.
I like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
I'd second mint for anyone who wants a "it just werks (TM)" experience with minimal configuration to throw on anything except a server.
For servers, these days I'd recommend Alpine on ARM architecture for a very good mix of high performance and having sane defaults set up so you can easily set up a reverse proxy, web server, etc.
OpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.
I love OpenSUSE (esp. Tumbleweed), but every time I see a tutorial about ML stuff, they are using Ubuntu. I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu that other distros don't have (e.g., having some libraries preinstalled, sane default configs, etc.)
> I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu
No advantage, but Ubuntu is the most popular distro for regular users / tutorial customers. Ubuntu also has the widest availability of support resources, even though the information is often not Ubuntu-specific.
If you use a non-Ubuntu (or non-Debian-derived) distro, you'll need to do a little bit of package-name mapping to get the prerequisites installed. This is annoying but only has to be done once (take notes!).
The bigger problem I've had with ML libs is that they're very picky about version compatibilities. Once you settle on a set of working/compatible versions (libs, python, python pkgs), make some effort to preserve your sources. Package versions can get deleted from the official repos, be prepared to build from source, etc.
