What filament should a complete beginner actually start with?

On filament: cheap PLA is fine while you're learning, honestly. You'll make mistakes, you'll waste material, and burning through a $12 spool on failed benchies beats wrecking a $25 one. What matters more than price is that it's PLA from somewhere that actually lists the material and diameter, and that you store it somewhere dry once it's opened. The cheap stuff sometimes has inconsistent diameter, which shows up as wierd extrusion, but most of it is way better than it used to be. Skip silk and specialty blends for now. Silk PLA prints okay but it's stringier and hides your mistakes less. Matte hides layer lines nicely but teaches you less about what your printer is doing. Plain PLA gives you honest feedback. Once you can dial in a clean basic print, then play around. One spool lasts longer than you'd think. A small print might use a few grams, so even printing test stuff constantly you're looking at weeks or months on a standard 1kg spool. The real consumption comes when you start printing big functional things. For the stringing in that corner, that's usally retraction and temprature. Do a temperature tower or just drop your nozzle temp by 5-10 degrees and see if it improves. Don't chase perfection on print one, just note what changed between prints. On Mint with Orca, the main gotcha is the device connection stuff, which can be flaky depending on your setup. The workaround that works fine: slice to a file, pop it on an SD card or use the printer's web interface if it has one, and you're done. Slicing itself works identically on Linux. Also check your printer profile in the slicer matches your actual machine, because defaults matter more than people think, especially bed size and nozzle diameter. And level your bed properly before every print for the first dozen or so. Most early failures are bed leveling, not filament, not software.

Funny timing, I set my first one up in the living room last month and had the same moment of 'okay now what'. One thing that surprised me was how much a full spool weighs when you first hold it, felt like way more plastic than I pictured. I've been printing little storage boxes and cable clips for practice and the spool barely looks touched. Does the leftover plastic on a spool ever go bad if it just sits on the printer for weeks, or is that only a problem in really humid places?

I went through the same 'what next' feeling last winter. The one thing that changed everything for me was getting a cheap digital caliper. Sounded like overkill until I used it to measure my first layer spacing and realized my bed was way off from what the paper method told me. Ten bucks, fixed months of frustration. Also for Linux, I keep a USB stick with the sliced files, old habit but it works every time.

Update: went with the budget PLA like the first reply suggested and it's been totally fine. First few prints came out rough but that was on me, not the spool. Also grabbed a cheap set of calipers after reading that comment about bed leveling and yeah, my paper method was way off. Second layer sticks every time now.