I think mid translates to reliable and boring. Which is desirable for an OS.

Mint is for people who just want stuff to work and not fiddle about too much. It does that very well. Anyone who simply wants an alternative to Windows that is easy to get into and use will be perfectly happy with it. If you want to customise everything to a t, Mint isn't for you

Low bullshit quotient. No sudden garbage.

I switched when one guy unilaterally decided Ubuntu would completely flip its user interface, for no goddamn reason, the night before a long-term-support feature freeze.

It's simple and solid enough to give to people who don't know what they're doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It's a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that's the point.

Mint was my “gateway distro” to get away from windows as a daily driver. It still is my daily driver and it’s given me enough guardrails to not screw it up too badly and learn.

I’m looking to go further up stream towards Debian. I’ve looked at arch and “arch that’s not allowed to be called arch because it has a gui installer”, but I’m not ready/able/“risk-tolerant-enough” to keep that stable as my daily driver. Fedora dormant seem quite right for me.

I really like mint, it meets my needs, has treated me well.

It just works. Whenever anyone I know tells me they are going to install ubuntu or try out linux for the first time - I just tell them to install linux mint and they've had no complaints so far.

(Even though I only use mint as a fallback distro, I really appreciate it being there)

I switched with Bookworm. It's great!

I never used a spin-off of a unique distribution of GNU/Linux on my own computer, except the dark Ubuntu times. It seemed right at the time.

Now, I don't see why I should recommend a distro that tries to be easier on new users when the original has sane defaults and is closer to upstream regarding all the tools and software bundled with it.

Here are my recommendations for new users in that order (regardless of their computer knowledge): Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, LFS. Friends can help with the installation and should consider easy maintainability when dealing with users who just want to use it.

My personal preferences are Gentoo and Debian.

I run a small business, but I'm also I'm an embedded systems developer on ARM processors for my products. Our toolchain is Windows-specific. That and the Adobe suite which I also need for my business keep my primary work machine Windows.

My laptop is Linux but even that creates occasional hassles with my work flow and presentations.

Me here playing VR games on Linux: wut?

At least you get Windows and not the abomination that is MacOS.

cries in iOS developer

And I love your grandmother :D

Cinnamon is more unified, but I don't think any DE has as many features as KDE.

You can get a Cinnamon image via U-Blue.

U-Blue in general is a nice collection of images because not only are there various unofficial options, but a lot of things like RPMFusion, etc. are preconfigured in their versions of the main editions (SilverBlue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx).

Or you can just rebase regular SilverBlue (or one of the three other official variants) to one of those images if you're running it already. Can roll back if you don't like it.

I doubt there'll be an official edition until Cinnamon has full Wayland support since Fedora is going all in on that now.

In the meantime, the community has it covered.