I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn't want to mess with it to try out different distros.
But today, my company's IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn't meet the specs for Windows 11, didn't stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)
So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They're a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!
I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like "Intel UHD Graphics aren't really recommended" so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha
A lot of beginners (like me) use mint because it is very simple out of the box and user friendly. It just works (unless, like me, you try using commands from arch on mint, and you break it)
Except when it doesn't. And really people are missing out, because there is so much more out there. I was playing with it today and I wonder how many people think that is what linux is? Fedora Gnome or KDE is even simpler and also just works.
But choice is good. I am just always surprised how often it is the default linux for new people. When it would be pretty low on my choice of distros. I set it up as a spare computer for guests a few years ago and it turned out to be more of a chore than I wanted to deal with.
...yeah it does break sometimes. Right now my grandma has it on her spare computer, which is a potato, and she said she didn't know it was linux on there, even though I told her when I installed it. It's mostly used as a bootloader for the browser, and it's dual booting whichever windows and mint
It doesn't always work, I agree, but for some people it does what they need.
If it's broke, I will absolutely try to fix it anyways, but not on anyone elses stuff.
I have mint as a safe distro, so if I mess up my stuff trying to use a distro I'm not ready for, I can take 3 minutes(ish) fixing it and hoping I didn't wipe the bios or anything else important off my computer when I tried installing arch with no clue how.