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Most Linuxes are small, and I would consider them for experts by default. This is because you won't be able to just Google problems and copy the solution from some blog. You'll have to actually troubleshoot yourself, read manuals, understand the system and discover the fix yourself. Most Linux software is straightforward, but you occasionally get a real nasty piece of work (Xorg, Nvidia drivers, pulseaudio) and it tends to be something very crucial that you can't just ignore. These are enormous, complex, impenetrable so it won't be fun "understanding" them. Also, when trying to fix a thing, it's really helpful to have a good idea of what the thing looks like when it *is* working. Otherwise it's like trying to [draw an elephant](https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/1498/How-Artists-In-The-Middle-Ages-Drew-Elephants-Based-On-Traveler-Descriptions) without ever having seen one, and going purely by textual descriptions.

There are some distros that explicitly market themselves as "beginner" distros. I consider this a red flag - generally, I would expect a distro's developers to be experts. So if they are specifically saying the distro is for beginners and not experts, does that mean they themselves wouldn't use it? Not a promising approach in FOSS. Prominent beginner distros are Mint, Pop OS. For a non-newbie, these cause more problems than they fix, and for a newbie, other OSes that are general-use can be just as easy.

Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro are some major OSes that I would call "intermediate". They're completely fine for a beginner, and as an expert you can definitely use them as well. For an expert all distros are interchangeable anyway, because an expert knows what the difference is between distros and how you can do things like replace the package manager to convert one distro to another. For the expert, the benefit of distros like Ubuntu is small while the extra busywork they introduce to customizing them is more due to complexity. You can also use distros like this with just a basic understanding of Linux and problem solving - you don't have to know how to code or even touch the terminal much.

Examples of expert distros are Arch, Gentoo, Void, Guix, NixOS. These are very minimal, so you have to set up a lot of conveniences yourself, which is easy for experts. Because the base distro is simple, the expert does not have to fight the stuff that "comes with it" too much when customizing. They also all have some benefit that only really matters to someone who is an expert: Compiling everything from source, not using systemd, configuration as code, running multiple versions of programs at once. You have to be an expert to even want these things, so if you're not, you're getting the cons with no pros. Another feature is that these are practically impossible to use without knowing to program. Sure, the distro will say you don't have to, and you'll see plenty of people who say they use it and can't code. But the distos are made so that scripting and using your own utility programs is easy, and without the ability to create them yourself, it will be very difficult to use it efficiently.