Yii2 fresh install: vendor/bower/jquery/dist path is wrong

Check your composer.json file in the root of your project. You should have a section that look slike this;

    "asset-installer-paths": {
        "bower-asset-library": "vendor/bower-assets"
    }

This tells composer where to locate the bower files library. You may need to run composer update afterwards to get hte locations updated.

Make sure you have executed this command:

composer global require "fxp/composer-asset-plugin:~1.2.0"

Also, check your composer.json for these followings:

Deprecated, but default option from Yii2:

"extra": {
    "asset-installer-paths": {
        "npm-asset-library": "vendor/npm",
        "bower-asset-library": "vendor/bower"
    }
},

New option

"config": {
    "fxp-asset": {
        "installer-paths": {
            "npm-asset-library": "vendor/npm",
            "bower-asset-library": "vendor/bower"
        },
    }
},

Then run either composer update if you already have a composer.lock file, or composer install if you don't have composer.lock file yet.

Please, refer the installation guide. It seems that you are missing asset plugin:

composer global require "fxp/composer-asset-plugin:~1.2.0"