Using literally anything that requires an out of tree kernel module, for one. Have some peripherals with features that aren’t supported by drivers already present in the kernel? Good luck getting any DKMS packages running on your machine.
I’m hearing a lot of very poor advice in here, at least from my perspective as a Linux user who’s been through the gamut of various distros over the years.
Fedora atomic desktops are not beginner distros. That is not their purpose, and their limitations make many things a person may eventually want to do with their machine a lot more complicated.
Debian? Are we joking here? Debian is an amazing distro for what its purposes are, but it’s not beginner friendly. Debian is bare bones.
Linux Mint is the easiest answer here. Ubuntu LTS (or its classroom based fork edubuntu) is another great answer. I know every Linux user on the internet recoils in horror at the mention of Ubuntu but it really is a drop in plug and play solution for kids and old people.
Three years ago when I used Mint I had minimal issues, but it sounds like things have declined since then.
My path went something like Pop_OS>Mint>Fedora Workstation>Mint>MXLinux>Nobara>EndeavourOS>Fedora Workstation for a solid year>and back to endeavour with hyprland.
But that’s just the stuff I’ve installed and actually kept longer than a few days. I’ve installed silverblue, kinoite, openSUSE tumbleweed, bluefin, bazzite etc just to learn them, and honestly I just don’t see the use case for average users in atomic distros. Non atomic distros are entirely stable if you don’t do stupid things with them, and doing stupid things with them is a great learning experience.
Same old Linux differences in opinion.