"The latest version of the friendly operating system is here. Install it on your computer today!"
"It is designed to work 'out of the box'"
"Most of our users come from Windows and they never look back."
"It's very easy to use. It features an intuitive desktop and adopts KISS principles. Anyone can rapidly feel at home and use Linux Mint. User experience, workflow and comfort is key."
Sounds like a beginner's distro to me. I always thought they were trying to go after a more beginner audience also as they pre-install all the proprietary codecs and a large collection of software that you'd most likely want to use out of the box as a beginner (not stripped down like you say).
Good luck if you want to use Google with autocomplete as your default search engine on the preinstalled Firefox though.
I can see how you'd take that from that marketing literature, but when they talk about KISS principles and what have you, they're talking about config files rather than GUIs for power user configuration. They don't really have the resources for anything else.
A more mainstream distro is what you're looking for if you want a consistent, modern experience.
If we're talking 'average user could probably get on with this' then the only one there you mentioned really is Ubuntu.
Fedora is close but in the end is really just a staging platform for RHEL. If you want to use any proprietary software /drivers you're likely going to need to enable RPMFusion etc.
OpenSUSE I haven't used in a long time so can't really make a comment but I know it's well established in the Linux space.
Debian is really more suited to the server environment & CentOS/RHEL actually are server distros. If the average user tried to install Debian if they managed to install it they'd likely end up with a system with lots of 'stable' (synonym: outdated) software & struggle to get anything proprietary installed (or OSS - does it even have a software store by default now?)
> If we're talking 'average user could probably get on with this'
We were talking about two things. What you just outlined, _and_ since you listed distrowatch's ranking I pulled out metrics from a job supporting a very, very large number of Linux systems.
And I'd argue that if you're looking for a consistent, modern, GUI based experience, then that correlates with the distros with an actually decently sized userbase with large corporate installations. They're the ones that are supporting Linux with people who wouldn't try to run Linux on a dead badger.
> then the only one there you mentioned really is Ubuntu.
> Fedora is close but in the end is really just a staging platform for RHEL. If you want to use any proprietary software /drivers you're likely going to need to enable RPMFusion etc.
What users end up doing instead of installing RPMFusion or somesuch is just downloading .rpms and installing them. If that's out of bounds for an average user than so is Windows with essentially the same model of downloading an exe or msi.
> OpenSUSE I haven't used in a long time so can't really make a comment but I know it's well established in the Linux space.
It's big in the European scene, particularly corporate and .gov envs. There's a language barrier at play hence why it doesn't make as much noise. There are millions of people using it as their daily driver though.
> Debian is really more suited to the server environment & CentOS/RHEL actually are server distros. If the average user tried to install Debian if they managed to install it they'd likely end up with a system with lots of 'stable' (synonym: outdated) software & struggle to get anything proprietary installed (or OSS - does it even have a software store by default now?)
I literally said "Debian and CentOS (or RHEL if you pay for it) on the server". I was digging into internal metrics so that you could have a better idea of what distros are actually being used by my than 1k people, and which ones have nothing better to do than botnet distrowatch.
The world has changed, move on! You're completely ignoring snaps, flatpaks and appimages. Ok, you can't install drivers with these, but if you have to install proprietary drivers, you're likely talking about an edge case where it is reasonable to expect that the user can add ppa, install from .deb or .rpm or compile from source.
You make it seem more complicated than it really is.
