I only ran Mint for a bit, but from what I’ve heard, it does a pretty good job with sane defaults and keeping things simple.

I’m talking more about the fact that when things break (as they always do), the easiest way to fix it is via the command line. It’s something I’m super comfortable with, having used *nix systems for more than 20 years, but i think even my very smart, technically inclined friend would be frustrated if he had to do it.

For instance, I installed Debian recently, and since I wanted luks disk encryption and dual boot, I had to very carefully set up the partitions in the installer, and the interface was frankly atrocious. I was very nervous about accidentally nuking the wrong partition, unlike with a Windows install where this is pretty much impossible.

Then, of course, the Nouveau drivers didn’t like my 4090, so on the first boot I had a blank screen (no signal), until grub timed out into a console. For some reason I was then thrown into a tty, so I had to startx, install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, tweak grub to pass some kernel parameters till I got back to a semi-stable boot. Oh, and I also had to get a newer kernel and nvidia drivers from backports, since the Debian packages are ancient.

I do realize that maybe Mint packages the latest proprietary nvidia drivers during the install, so maybe I would have avoided those particular issues, and I’m not sure how good Mint’s partitioning interface in the installer is.

Maybe Linux will work out of the box for a majority of users and they’ll never have to encounter the command line, but I’m skeptical.