Mint has user-friendly tools that are much better than Fedora's lack of tools and openSUSE's YAST for beginners.

Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the "I use arch BTW" meme.

As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It's not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn't have a big crowd.

Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don't think it's a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.

I like the mint project, but I dislike how it's done

I don't suggest mint to anyone anymore. I rather suggest Fedora or PopOs

wait Mint was (and still is) out of date?

Isn't red hat enough reason to not use fedora?

I'm sure talking about the 30days challenge from Raid Owl and I have an idea of his conclusion. First he's a power user (not in the fact of tweaking and scratch in the file system), he needs a lot of stuff to work. And for someone outside of the traditional office work or maybe developing, Linux is hard to use for graphics works, so sure Linux Mint is not for this kind of people but you should always recommended it to "normal" people and beginner in Linux. Sure in this case his conclusion is wrong, he should have used Fedora, Arch or OpenSUSE, but that's it.

Which is why I ask people one simple question: do they plan to game. If they plan to game, I don't recommend them Mint. If they aren't, I recommend them Mint.

it hasn't been a problem lately, but for basically an entire year I was helping first timers through getting a more recent lutris for games because the one mint shipped was ancient and broken and on top of that the 32 bit wine dependencies were practically impossible to resolve for some games

I've played this game every year since 1998, and each year I try a wider range of distros. Long story short, EndeavourOS is the first distro that worked reliably and has by far the best support resources.

came here to spread the good word of endeavor os

Oh, you need media codecs out of the box to watch pretty much anything in your browser?

That takes Fedora out.

OpenSUSE has probably the most confusing install interface for a noob you'll ever find. Which DE do I choose? What other software do I put in? How do I partition? Oh, I click a button here to make a user, or can I ignore it completely?

So much for OpenSUSE.

And don't get me started on Arch. You'd be way better off pushing a new user to Manjaro but everyone's got their panties in a twist about its devs.

Whatcha got now, big guy?

I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it's more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.

Idk I never really liked mint it seemed too ui polished without much back end polish.

For some reason its the goto for noobs maybe since it comes with a desktop already bundled with no extra config needed usually. But theres so many distros that have that now as well as up to date packages.

I'm not sure but, I always recommended Mint for it's ease of use, I tried fedora, didn't like it, will likely never use it again. First impressions are a pain cause if you fail the first impression you lose before you begin. It could be an amazing system but, it was a bigger pain to setup and get going plus had less resources for me to get started while using more lesser known tools that wern't easily transferrable from the previous systems I has tried.

For me, the systems I've installed Mint on for people, haven't had any problems at this current time. While I have never had an issue using Fedora myself(never been interested enough in OpenSUSE to keep with it when I've tried it), I'll never recommend Fedora in similar cases where I've installed Mint. The machines were older and the users aren't Linux enthusiasts. They just want a working machine to do basic tasks without breaking their bank to get a new machine when their Windows OS reached EOL.

However I can't confirm or explain why the people you say that are doing this challenge are having problems. I don't know their hardware specs and I don't know them so I don't know what they know about Linux.

(Please note, to all Mint users, I'm not saying Mint is only for non-Linux enthusiasts. I love how Mint is good for the non-enthusiasts and enthusiasts alike).