I don't want this to become political drama so i will say only this much and never speak of this part of xlibre again as it's a political minefield but MUST be mentioned when talking about Xlibre, openmandriva and devuan at this point as all 3 have similar political stances, again i won't comment on this again but it MUST be said and kept in mind when getting deep into linux going forward.
The arguments against Xlibre, devuan and Open Mandriva are heavily based on the creator of the group and the group in general being against far-left politics or politics in general in coding (this does NOT mean you can't have those views, they just want politics out of coding, period), which has become a problem in the linux community as some linux distros and even the linux foundation (though the foundation can generally be ignored at this point) are becoming more about far-left political stances than improving and fixing code, this is a brewing firestorm that if not put out could cause linux to crash, as someone who just wants to use linux hearing about how the gnome foundation hates me for being a straight white male conservative doesn't exactly make me happy personally, so this was bound to happen eventually, xlibre for it's part just takes a "we are staying out of politics" policy and now is getting attacked for it.
Everyone is welcome to dislike Xlibre for their stances on anything irl political but the code itself is fine as far as i've seen, so i must defend it as the code is fine (at least last i checked).
As for the arch issue, that's in general a problem with the AUR with alot of packages, the duckstation issue for example, i believe the distro i use, garuda, supports a garuda version of Xlibre, either that or the chaotic AUR uses a specific "official" version.
Oh and i suppose since i'm making 1 political post, i should explain the opensuse situation, opensuse used to be mostly politically uninvolved, but a few years ago some politically VERY far left members got on the board of directors and started banning anyone, including other board members, for the slightest infraction to their "political mandates" for all members, it has gotten so bad that they had trouble filling their empty board seats recently as even those who agree with the policies were afraid of stepping out of line and getting banned, opensuse isn't the only one to pull this but it's definitely the one most obvious, i expect opensuse to be absorbed by SUSE eventually because of this as the current trajectory is not sustainable, pretty sad as opensuse used to be one of the greats.
Alright, done, not touching politics again, don't quote me on them as i won't answer political stuff as to abide by the rules.
Linux mint is the go-to for a new user, if you have trouble with that there are other options but mint is generally the first distro i suggest to new users dipping their toe into the linux waters, other good options are fedora, debian/devuan and manjaro, i have problems with manjaro as a more advanced user but as a newbie it's good for getting into arch, avoid gentoo like the plague, it's more or less the "i know what i'm doing" branch.
If you want to be a bit adventurous, any arch distro is great as arch as it's the best branch for gaming, but generally i'd avoid arch as your first try.
