These thumbnails are also the reason why people stay away from Linux. How is the little girl relevant to your question?

What problems?

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue. But most people don't and for them Mint will work just fine. If you want cutting edge, don't use Mint. But that's not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.

As someone who daily drives Mint, wut.

Why did you post a drawing of a child? Kinda weird

Linux users can't even agree on what distro is actually beginner friendly, so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?

I think the onboarding and new user experience for Mint could be better, but I think there's one important thing that I think makes Mint a good intro distro: Its Ubuntu base.

If you look up guides for "linux" it usually gives instructions for Ubuntu, which usually also apply to Mint. Likewise, if you look for software downloads you tend to find Ubuntu debs.

I know flatpak fixes these issues to an extent, but I think we're not there yet.

Because it is stable and works really well. It has GUI apps that are not only not broken but well designed and snappy.

Because choosing a distro to begin with isn't easy. Ask ten people and you'll get eleven suggestions.

Because for most use cases, Mint works flawlessly. It changes little from time to time. It has all the drivers to get started with a wide range of common hardware. It has all the codecs to play common media formats.

Of course if the package update is too slow, it's not for you, but then unlike you, most people don't need the latest and greatest. They just need something that works from the get-go with predictable behavior.

Laughs in Debian Stable

Mint has managed to become a meme and that's no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.

That's just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.

I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I've run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn't care what I call Facebook and email.

We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.

I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.

AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I've defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.

Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.

Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can't deal with ... something ... often gets ... educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.

For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I've been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.

Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Mint works. Most alternatives don't. I can install Mint on a total newbie's system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.

On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' philosophy.

Ah, OpenSuse. The distro with the package management that spams your drive full of unnecessary optional dependencies.

Would always recommend EndeavourOS.

I recommend fedora to every one. It's the correct kind of stable distro. The kernel updates are slow to roll out after being tested and all... But guess what version of plasma I have? 6.1. That's just a few weeks later than arch got it.

Plus not to mention how easy setting up my Optimus gpu was because of rpmfusion. I have never had such ease with any other distro.

So I recommend fedora all the way.

Anybody that already has had a computer for 2 years and is coming from Windows will have almost no problems with Mint. Stability is top priority for first time Linux users and you need some visual guide with screenshots. Mint also has a great default look and setup for people coming from Windows. Mint is probably the best distro to put on your mom's old laptop that is "getting slow" because of viruses.

I'd recommend KDE Neon or Ubuntu also depending on the situation but if I don't know anything about the person and computer I'd say Mint.

The moemorphic character shown in the picture is Archchan, created by ravimo. I wonder why show her in a discussion about Mint?

Because you're dealing with lifelong windows users who want a reassuringly familiar looking OS not fucking linux techs

Jesus christ learn to tailor to the user

Because Fedora is open source only to the point of it being pathological. If there isn't am open source driver most time you're just boned. Someone new is going to have a tough time with it, and the community is on average a very "lol rtfm" bunch. Not as bad as Arch, but that's not saying much.

Meanwhile, despite the problems around Ubuntu, Debian communities are much more understanding and helpful. Mint even with old packages is going to be an easier time for a newbie. Certainly a newbie unfamiliar with the way entirely too much of the FOSS community is.

@Magnolia_ been running Mint for years and never had issues with the package versions being too old for anything 🤷🏻‍♂️

I installed Mint (no idea mint was old tbh) looked into Gentoo and tried the live boot USB option. 'This looks nice, no how do I install" The install option opened a web page (gentoo wiki) with several options for guides based on various permutations. All options send you in a ring without actually telling me how to install.

I went back to Mint as it does the few things I need a PC to do these days:

Some kind of office suite with spreadsheet and word processor, Steam, Netflix and Prime, Firefox

Added bonus is that it runs MegaMek natively AND i don't need to read pages of documentation, just click install.

30 days? I'm on month 3 with no issues.

Meanwhile, I had to dump Nobara on another PC because I couldn't get RDC working, no matter what instructions I followed.

And no, VNC wasn't an option for this.

It's easy to install, it's Ubuntu based which means stable and a wide variety of software and support. Cinnamon looks beautiful in Mint and works perfectly. Installing a deb is a breeze and using the App Store is way easier than using YAST. The cli commands are now easy to understand or remember compared to apt.

Fedora usb creation is a nightmare and can potentially f up your bios if something goes wrong. DNF is also but easy to understand or remember compared to apt.

Gnome is too barebones for a first time user whereas Cinnamon is feature rich and is themed very well. Plus great wallpapers are included. The lock screen wallpapers are easily changed and look great too.

As long as there is no shit Nvidia card the driver installation tends to work perfectly. Don't use Nvidia people. They are a shit, unethical, don't give a crap about Linux company. Use AMD.

And for Linux users who've been around longer, there's Linux Mint Debian Edition which for us is even better because it's not Ubuntu based but Debian based and stable.

I get the latest Firefox directly from Mozilla and any app I can't find in Synaptics I can normally get in Flatpak. Works perfectly well for me. I highly recommend it.

Because people suggest distros based on their preference, not what is best suited in a given situation.

On one hand Mint is limited to X11 for now and surprise surprise “dealing with multiple monitors is horrible on Linux”. On other hand they’re on NVIDIA. This is close to not be the case, but X11 was a hard requirement for decades