why not just skip the middleman

Because many people take for granted their advanced understanding of Unix systems that allows them to get into the “meat”.

If you’re the type of person that is excited by a terminal display and prepared to read a whole pile of documentation, then sure–go straight to Arch, or Alpine if you’re insane. But most people want something that’s familiar, easy to set up, and will never force you to open a terminal. That’s Mint (plus a number of other beginner-friendly distros). And most average people are perfectly happy to stay there. And that’s perfectly fine.

You’re not missing anything. Mint is perfectly good for the vast majority of users.

Linux distros are a bit like vehicles. For most people, a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla will do everything they need. But if you go onto forums of car-enthusiasts, you can probably find thousands of voices that say those vehicles have such low horsepower, or they’re not perfectly streamlined, or arguing about the buttons on the seat belts. Things that the average user doesn’t care much about.

I started 20 years ago with Slackware, tried out FreeBSD, and a number of others. I switched to Mint as a daily driver years ago. These days I found what I like (CachyOS), but I’m fairly knowledgable and quite comfortable on the command line, which is definitely not the case for most newer folks.

Mint is a great distro. When I put it on my wife’s laptop, literally everything worked right away. Have fun!

I use Notepad++ for coding daily. I’m not a fan of things like autocomplete, and the times I need to look up a definition, the search is fast enough to make up for a lack of indexing. And the regex implementation is great.

It’s possible, but there are plenty of reasons an SD card can be slow. Not necessarily going bad.

If you can find a microSD adapter, you have plenty of options. The “server” version of raspberry pi OS is a CLI OS based on Debian. If you use the raspberry pi flash tool, you can even set up the SSH login details before you flash it so you don’t need to hook up a monitor or keyboard to the pi.

Is this the cast of Ocean’s 7 or something?

The lower six carry the team for most of the film. At the crucial moment, they’re all straining to crack the highest security system known to man, and just as the team is about to get locked out, the first guy walks in and types in the password. “Oh yeah, I sent a phishing email to the CEO before we started. Execs are pretty stupid.”

Nah, it’s just HTML and CSS, no scripting

Dang, you right

I got fancy and set mine to monospace

Success!

Linus himself sees his own behavior as problematic and has put significant work toward changing it. Call it whatever you want, I guess, but just because it doesn’t result in physical bruises doesn’t mean it’s not problematic.

There’s some controversy around him–he has a history of anger issues and it’s impacted his work. But his contributions to the open source community are practically unquantifiable.

Overall, I’m incredibly grateful for him and his work, but still hope that he continues to work on his personal issues and becomes his best self.

I guess I would classify features like variable refresh rates and fractional scaling as “advanced”, but that’s fair. I moved from Cinnamon to Gnome because wayland was working better for me, so fair point. I imagine it won’t be too long before Cinnamon catches up, though.

For now, I’m just using a handful of extensions to make Gnome feel more like Cinnamon. Can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of KDE, but that’s just me.

Fedora is a good option. I’m surprised to hear about hardware incompatibilities with Mint, though. Do you have obscure or bleeding-edge hardware?

I’ll +1 the Ventoy suggestion. Lets you try lots of things easily. Try at least Fedora KDE, Ubuntu, and Mint. Go with whichever feels good to you when you try them out.

Cachy user here. Nope.

Anyone who says Cachy is good for a newcomer is taking their knowledge for granted. Most people getting into Linux for the first time are climbing several learning curves all at once. There are simpler distros that allow you to learn at a more reasonable pace.

The only time I would recommend CachyOS to a newcomer is if they have bleeding-edge hardware and aren’t afraid of a challenge.

No no, that’s an ornithologist. An orgasm is when a crowd of people applaud vigorously.

🫥 Their “repository” is a OneDrive folder copied from the last guy’s laptop

This is more nitpicking. Yes, there’s a difference between partition and disk. But if we want to get technical, it’s not disk encryption unless you’re using a HDD. SSDs don’t have disks.

At the end of the day, FDE would generally imply that all partitions with user data on them are encrypted. So it would generally include root and home partitions, and generally not include the boot partition, and would likely include partitions like /var and /opt, though not necessarily.

To add to the other comments: it’s “full-disk” to distinguish it from “per-file” encryption. And “full-partition” didn’t catch on, probably because functionally an unencrypted boot partition makes little practical difference.