Accessible Distros for a beginner?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Well, there are some hardcore distributions that favor compiling most
packages locally(Gentoo comes to mind), but they generally wouldn't
get brought up in a thread talking about beginner recommendations.

Generally, compiling from source is only necessary if you're
interested in helping to beta test new versions of software or you
want to run something your distro doesn't have a native package for,
and even then, you can often find pre-compiled binary packages for
most major distributions from the application's website.

Yes, compiling newer versions yourself is one option if you go with a
distribution that puts stability over being up-to-date such as Debian
Testing, Ubuntu LTS, and other LTS editions and need a newer version
of certain software than is provided by the distro, but there are
other options(such as backports or switching to Debian testing or the
STS version of a distro that has both LTS and STS releases.

-Jeffery