I haven’t used Bazzite, but comparing against Nobara, Mint’s updater and graphical software store are way more polished.
Also, every once in a while, I find that some application that I need is only distributed as a .deb (such as the AWS VPN Client), so it’s nice to be on a Debian-family distro when that situation arises.
I use both Mint and Nobara. Nobara is on my gaming rig, and Mint is my daily driver laptop. I agree that KDE is better than Cinnamon, but I do feel like Cinnamon is more streamlined for folks who don’t want/need all the bells and whistles that come with KDE.
Also, I read somewhere that full support for Wayland on Cinnamon is slated for this year.
The Flatpak drag-and-drop thing I’ve seen before (even on Mint) and I think it’s because of permissions. Try installing Flatseal and monkey around with your Flatpaks’ permissions; it may help.
I’ve been daily driving Mint for about 2 years now and I still love it. I do a lot of work with Python including some data science, and it works well for all that. The one bug I can’t deal with is the fact that fractional scaling causes screen tearing in the Cinnamon DE because it still uses X. Because of this, I use Nobara on my gaming PC. My experience with Nobara has been that every update is a coin flip on whether or not I’ll get a new bug, but they’re mostly just minor inconveniences. Otherwise I like it a lot.
I personally use Nobara for gaming and streaming. I don’t remember why I ended up going with Nobara over Bazzite, but I love it!
I left Windows for ideological reasons - moral opposition to nonfree software, wanting to be free of corporate surveillance, and not wanting to support the American techno-plutocracy. But now when I try to convert people from Windows, I just say “the UX sucks”.
I have to use Windows 11 for my day job. It is so much slower, context menus are difficult to navigate, everything defaults to being saved on OneDrive, and honestly, I just think it’s ugly.
I used to sleep on the grass before my jujutsu class. Got bit by some bugs once, but honestly, the worst problem was trying to find a spot without goose poop.
I don’t get why everyone and their mother has to shit on Mint. I started my Linux journey on servers, but my first home computing distro was Ubuntu 16. It wasn’t what I needed so I stuck with Windows 10. After migrating my homelab server to Almalinux 9 and realizing how much better life could be if I just purged Microsoft from my household, I installed Linux Mint on my laptop and have used it ever since. If I had any less of a warm welcome into Linux for home computing, I might have just stuck with Windows 10.
I consider myself somewhere between a layperson and a power user. I’m pretty comfortable with BASH since I work with servers a lot, but low-level stuff is still black magic to me. I’m aware that KDE Plasma has a ton of cool bells and whistles (I use Nobara on my gaming rig), but other than KDE connect for sharing clipboard, I don’t really need any of that fancy stuff on my laptop. And I think the typical layperson probably won’t even set them up in the first place.