I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma
At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)
Are media codecs hard to install on Fedora? I haven’t daily driven Fedora in a while, but last I remember it was one of the top-level categories in GNOME Software. Click it then install all the things. Although I suppose if the user didn’t know what a media codec is that wouldn’t help them very much