Well it depends, there are people that start with arch, but a minority, not the rule. I suggest Debian for my friends starting with Linux, I don't see why mint and etc could be better as those distros keep newbies away from the terminal. I know some that used mint Ubuntu and etc and are very afraid if using terminal, of doing SSH into a node...I think the earlier one breaks that mith that terminal is hard or for hackers the merrier.