Oh, I think Mint is one of the most accessible distros. I use Cinnamon desktop environment and that is very nice for new users. I was referring to starting with Debian stable, it is pretty baseline with no frills. Great for a server, but you will need to research what additional packages and repositories you want to get from it what you want. I just like how almost all software made for Linux has instructions for installing on Debian, that is not the case for most other distros.