That would be the stable distribution, the current distribution which is the basis for the next release (now 15.1) was last updated today. It is also highly stable relative to other distributions including Arch so for I would recommend it to anyone with some knowledge of Linux.
Arch is great of course, and the Arch Wiki is one of the best general resources for Linux out there.
It’s such a great application, but I just don’t like microblogging as a format. Some people swear by it but I think there’s too much noise, and the top of every feed is the loudest or the most recent voice (neither of which I think is useful). I think the reddit/HN-like model is better for general discussion, so I also think I’d prefer Lemmy to Mastodon.
Arch is cool but not a casual distro. I’ve been using Slackware as my daily driver for ages but I wouldn’t suggest it to a new user looking for something to cut their teeth on, or for someone who doesn’t want to spent a little bit of time configuring their host. Full installers are nice (even Arch has one now), nothing wrong with them if you want to use them and are happy with defaults.
For casual users I would suggest Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.
A distro for casual users would include lots of pre-existing (possibly opinionated) configuration, graphical tools for config, a graphical installer with automatic partitioning, and ready-made package managers. It minimises interaction with a terminal as much as possible. It is still very useful to get comfortable with interacting with a terminal, understanding the file system structure of Linux, and getting your head around the standard userland tools (GNU Coreutils, your package manager, and your init system which is probably systemd) - but you should be able to avoid this for now with distros like Pop!_OS or Linux Mint, and even when you do become comfortable with these things they are both still excellent distros.
Fedora is excellent but I wouldn’t call it a casual/beginner distro. Ubuntu is tricky because it is fairly easy to use, but the direction the distro has gone is concerning (others may disagree but going all-in on Snap was a dumb idea). I can’t think of any other obviously casual distros with a huge base.
It depends what you want/need email for. My view is that you should maximise privacy where you can, but that email should be considered insecure - you can never really be sure that the message you have delivered has passed through SMTP servers in a secure way, there is no contract requiring this in email.
I wouldn’t use ProtonMail for your day to day email address, in my opinion it’s overkill. I think ProtonMail is well-intentioned, but I also believe a lot of what they have is snake oil - email is fundamentally insecure, and unless you’re using PGP all the time (this is flawed as well as while it’s E2E encrypted, metadata leaks are inevitable due to the way email works with headers describing author, destination, user agent, and other details) you can’t assume the content of your communication is secure.
I would look into a paid email provider which has good support and a fairly reasonable and reputable commitment to privacy and security. I personally use mailbox.org, which is also very inexpensive; I have heard good things about FastMail, though I have never tried it.
For secure email, I have heard great things about Tutanota. I would sooner take their word on matters of privacy and security over ProtonMail’s, but again you shouldn’t do this blindly. PGP while a great protocol is not and has never been practical for this kind of thing, it is at best good for signing your messages so recipients can optionally confirm you are who you say you are.
Man Sabaton rules, their music is sick and they write about such heroic stories like this.
I used it as my daily driver for 2 years, only stopped because I got an Apple silicon machine and went all in on Mac for my day to day.
Slackware is fantastic. What I like most about it is the tiny mental footprint - you can grok how it works without any trouble, the distribution is basically a bunch of shell scripts and a package manager. It’s batteries-included which is different to some distros today - the concept of a lean Slackware machine is neither helpful nor particularly useful, you install the entire distro and use what you need. The package manager doesn’t have built in dependency resolution, but this isn’t necessary for the distribution, and third party packages are reasonably easy to manage with other package managers (Slack-ish ones like slackpkg+, sbopkg, etc., as well as general use ones like Nix).
I highly recommend it at least to try. It is opinionated, but won’t get in your way if you want to change it. It is easy to use and the community is friendly. Try getting Liveslak and giving it a spin.