Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, it’s very easy and smooth as arch goes.

But if you have someone who is under the illusion that Linux is hard. The moment they have any issue it might frustrate them enough to bounce off. I know so many people who have gotten recommended some flavor of the week like Manjaro, Bazite, Pop_Os or Nobara, who that has happened with. I’ve never talked to anyone who was recommended Mint with Cinnamon, used it, and then decided it was too hard and went back to windows. Plenty of people will say “well I used XYZ and didn’t have any issues” or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but that’s survivorship bias, the people who didn’t deal with it aren’t here to say otherwise.

So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later they’ll be like “yah, I kind of want to see what else is out there” and then they can try other things. I get that, cinnamon mint is limited in some ways, but not in ways a first time Linux user is going to care about.

Zorin OS is also a good choice if they have a high resolution screen, because Mint’s Cinnamon desktop has awful screen tearing when you increase the scaling.

Zorin user here. Might switch to Mint. Might not help, but after almost 2 years, I still don’t know what I’m doing.

Unless it’s flatpak.

But like, I have no idea how to update my bluetooth driver. And I really want to.

There are other utilities that I can’t install. It’s like the tools you need to install to make linux easy still need terminal to install.

It’s all “you’re missing prerequesits. They won’t be installed”.

So you need to be smart enough in linux to install the tools to make it easy, but if you knew how to install the tools, you wouldn’t need them.