I decided to take a glance at NOOBS, out of curiosity, since it's mentioned regularly in this group.
Unlike Raspbian, I got a blank screen.
So I re-tried burning the SD card and looking at the install instructions again. No luck. Tried a different SD card. No luck. Had I done something wrong with the formatting of the card? No, the install instructions just say format the SD-card as FAT, unzip NOOBS, and copy the files onto the card. So I try a different tool for reformatting the card and try again. No luck.
Google "noobs not booting" and start ploughing through pages of stuff.
And finally there it is: Unlike Raspbian, NOOBS can not detect that the HDMI is not connected, and requires you to press "3" on the keyboard to switch to the RCA. (I'm using a small video monitor.)
How unfriendly is that? I wonder how many newbies would have thrown the RPi away before working out what had gone wrong because of that one.
Given that the Pi is aimed at education, and newbies to computing, maybe for people with limited money and resources, I find this particular issue surprising. Opinions?