Use Linux professionally. Worked with RHEL for years. Current gig uses Debian servers. Daily driver is a system 76 machine with the pop OS that came on it. Debian derivatives make great daily drivers for those of us that just need a browser, terminal, working wifi, and the ability to build and run containers.
Don't forget, that the Mint developers and developers of other "user-friendly distros" do very hard work, so you can enjoy less-hassle distro.
But it is very boring for "Never Settle" philosophy to use such distros.
Don't forget, that some people enjoy tinkering thing around them. Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora etc are simply not interesting for them. They choose the hardest possible way and enjoy it.
The true Linux users are the ones that realize that all Linux is the same. The only differences is package management, Desktop Environment, and customization by the Distro creator.
You can literally just install Debian stable with Cinnamon DE and get basically Linux Mint on Debian. Bonus points for adding backports so you get a slightly more updated kernel.
I know this is a joke, but you should use whatever distro you want to use....because at the end of the day it's all Linux.
I don't have any need for arch, fedora is fine as it is. Might try arch if I have more reliable internet someday, my main concern is my system going brrrr one evening when I need to do some important legal work.
Different distros are better at different things. Need a stable distro for your grandma? Use Debian or Mint. Need latest software? Use Arch or Gentoo. (And people do need latest software sometimes. For playing games, or in my case, for doing research. The F is FOSS stands for Free after all.) Similarly, there are server distros like AlmaLinux tuned for high reliability. I think it's counterproductive to argue about the "best" distro.
I guess the meme technically doesn't say that Mint is the best, but it kinda gives off that feeling by ridiculing Arch users.
I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn't use apt, honestly don't like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That's why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I'm on nixos unstable and it's currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
I use Fedora more (at work) but I love the concept and execution of Mint. I’ll definitely use it on future personal machines.
I’m not an expert on distros, but it seems to me like the best drop-in replacement for Windows. It’s familiar for windows users, but it feels much better to use. That combination is great for getting normal people to consider using it.
I've used Mint and, honestly, I don't like it. The default applications are kind of annoying to deal with, I find KDE and GNOME far superior. Themes are very limited. I just don't see why you'd want to use Cinnamon.
Been using arch + sway + neovim for 5 years now. Everyone says it’s the “I spend more time fucking with configs than getting work done” setup but then why does my dotfiles repo look like this?
Dayum, 9 years ago i started with mint and distro hopped a bit then daily drived arch for many years, and now I'm back to lmde6, so you ain't gotta call me out like that
idk man, i just like me a good non derivative distro. Debian, arch, nix, gentoo, whatever as long as it has less hands it's being passed through im happy.
Definition of standing on the shoulders of giants. Even from the start when it offered the codecs Ubuntu didn't mint has been there. Same for arch want something specified but don't want to start at a lfs or Gentoo it has your back all you have to do is read up on the bits you want. I think it's amazing that for me the best distros are still community ones.
Meanwhile I'm over here dual booting Mint and Artix. I like fun, bleeding edge hobby distros and reliable boring ones that do everything I really need completely reliably.
My only issue with mint is that it is downstream of Ubuntu so I feel like the maintainers have to spend too much effort fixing kinks and bypassing Canonical's dumb ideas.
LMDE is cool too, but then its too stable and doesn't have all the nice UI features of regular mint lol.
Yeah, this is me completely, although I did use Fedora kde spin as I was getting tired of the mint ui. I used it exclusively for many many years and the steamdeck completely changed my opinion.
IMO Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch: a pile of duct tape in the name of user experience ready to blow at the worst time, down to the TLS certificate mishaps.