I can tell you from experience that it’s not a given. Not because of Mint, but because of the driver. You’re just lucky that your hardware-driver-kernel combination happened to work flawlessly.

I only marked those who bundle the driver with the image since that way they can treat is as core system package and add the necessary deep system configurations + helper scripts straight form the start. There are in fact quite a few distros who use such a helper tool (I think Zorin has one too?), but even with their best effort the driver still causes issues so god damn often or just fails to install for weird reasons. Additionally there might be issues after updates. Distros that integrate them from the start might add a few extra scripts to mitigate update problems, perhaps ensure Secure Boot still works, make specific changes to Wayland due to Nvidia being really bad with it by default, set up everything for hybrid graphics, ecetera.

My brother just threw out an RTX 3060 because of all the issues (in that case on OpenSuse) and I had so. many. issues. In the last 10 years with all kinds of green GPUs that I can only in good conscious recommend distros with pre-installed drivers to Nvidia users, and to avoid that company like the Plague.

Debian is rock solid, there are even more user-friendly distros though. In a few edge-cases it will expect you to know your way around things, however there are a lot of guides for it. Going with this will cause the growth of a mighty white beard!

Arch Linux will make you cry. If you want to learn how to fix and configure things it’s great (and their wiki arguably is the greatest of all), but their lack of QA and expectation to do that yourself often causes issues. You’ll probably cut your fingers on its bleeding edge. If you want to learn with less bleeding I’d recommend CachyOS these days. I’m certainly not saying this because my computer didn’t boot after updates multiple times. /s

HOWEVER if you have an Nvidia GPU, first off: I’m so sorry. Secondly, you absolutely (!) should use a distro that takes care of their driver for you. Their drivers are hot steaming garbage that you do not want to meddle with (many distros try their best to do it for you, but often enough it won’t work for some people). See below, Nvidia distros marked with recycling symbol.

A few other options to consider with noticeable features:

• Bazzite (♻️): If you mainly play games. User-friendly, most compatible with handhelds next to CachyOS. Takes care of a lot of small things related to gaming.
• Fedora: If you want modern features on a very stable system. Very good ecosystem. Basically the other stable workhorse next to Debian. Will spawn a nice hat on your head, m’lady.
• OpenSuse: Also very stable, best distro for those concerned about US influence (it’s strongly EU-based). Tumbleweed arguably most stable rolling-release distro (newest system software) with a great graphical settings’ tool YaST (future unknown, unfortunately). Leap is rock-solid but slow, meant more for Office PCs and Enterprise users. After installing this you’ll suddenly start talking german.
• Linux Mint: If you want things to just work with the flattest learning curve possible for former Windows victims. Helpful tips for Ubuntu usually apply and that weird software offering you a manual download for Ubuntu will just work.
• ElementaryOS: Very good for users used to MacOS, probably flattest learning curve for them. Great accessibility! Not as feature rich as others (their whole desktop is made in-house, so it’s very cohesive but a lot of work for them), but what they have is very well tested.
• ZorinOS (Core): Also very good. Most likely the one with the biggest software selection from the start (comes with both Snap and Flatpak pre-configured). Probably the one you’d eventually find on some school computer.

And three others interesting if you might buy new hardware soon (damn, you rich):

• TuxedoOS (♻️): Default OS on devices from Tuxedo Computers (EU). Works on any machine and is a really nice distro in general.
• SlimbookOS (♻️): Default OS for Slimbook (EU) devices. Also nice.
• Pop_OS! (♻️): Default OS for System76 (US) devices. They’re currently developing a whole new desktop environment (Cosmic), so their normal release hangs a little bit behind. It’s okay though. Be aware it’s from a US company (not just maintainers, but commercial entity). Fucked up Linus Tech Tips once.

The lack of PPA support might bite you though. For newcomers I’d strongly recommend staying with the standard Mint (Cinnamon) version, any reason not to is highly technical and more of an issue for the maintainers.

if there are working drivers that don’t have issues

There aren’t. Some distros come with Nouveau alone, which is often awfully slow or lags behind in support for new cards. Some by now ship with nouveau + NVK, which is still unsuitable for demanding tasks and has bugs as NVK is still beta. And some ship with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is a hot mess. Changing something about this usually ends up in a mess due to how the Nvidia driver has to install itself into the system every time an update runs, and the fact you have to basically rip out a kernel module for it (nouveau).

Sure bro, all the endless people having issues with those shitty drivers are at fault. Nvidia is making a whole new driver because they just love to do it, not because the old one is a huge mess.

I’m doing my best helping family and friends with these things on various distros, but by now they all moved over to AMD or Intel or are in the process of it; even swapping out RTX 3000 series cards because the driver keeps fucking up and the Wayland support is a hot mess. Every single time the constant issues and glitches vanished once the Nvidia was thrown out. Nvidia on Linux is just hot garbage.

Uugh, why do I see this at 3 in the morning. Good thing there’s Termux.

Security is the first thing that comes to mind. Compartmentalization prevents or at least makes it considerably harder for compromised services to screw up all the others.

Another thing would be that it might be easier to manage backups and snapshots.

Outside of Valve hardware certainly Bazzite or Nobara. Not sure about Vive VR support in general though, but if it exists those distros are the most likely to work with it with minimum of issues.

Wait, if my brain runs and uses Linux then…

Oh god…

ADHD is a zombie LLM process constantly spitting out vaguely related nonsense, draining your energy and processor cycles for nothing productive.

It all makes sense now.

Meanwhile Fedora‘s (Red Hat) dominance is never even questioned.

Huh? Pretty sure it’s constantly questioned, especially by those who reject systemd. Sometimes that isn’t hate, but well-reasoned (but occasionally badly worded) rejection.

The hate some have for Ubuntu and Omarchy is ridiculous.

Wasn’t Omarchy made by a fash, TERF or some other kind of extremist? Harmony is great and all, but like with tolerance it can’t be absolute.

Ubuntu gets their well-deserved amount of criticism in my eyes since they still haven’t published the damn Snap server source code (afaik). A distro that had such great ideas in the past like including Amazon ads inside the desktop or silently symlinking apt commands to snap have to do a better job to regain community trust, instead they reject efforts like Flatpak or AppImage and build partial closed-source.

I like harmony too, but please don’t attempt to deligitimise well-reasoned criticism.

One more thing I should’ve mentioned: It’s important to make a (free) account if you try it. Although they still offer a chat interface without it, that interface is then connected to one of their very small models and lacks the “Thinking” feature (same as ChatGPT’s “Reflection”). Not very useful in most cases and more of an appetizer.

Certainly interesting. I’d recommend you to take a look at Mistral AI (“Le Chat”), they’re a European company and far more trustworthy in terms of data security and privacy (GDPR and such) than US products. Their models are all available for self-hosting which might provide more flexibility in the future in terms of self-hosting and their web service doesn’t try to aggressively extract every data point from you (although you perhaps circumvent that with the proxy anyway). In my personal experience it’s also more likely than e.g. ChatGPT to admit when it doesn’t know something (or ask for specific data it needs) instead of making shit up, but I don’t have definitive data for that claim.

Of course I don’t know how well it works in Japanese or from Japan, if you try let me know! 🙂

Hated, the new Systemd component. It replaces sudo cursing at you and occasionally discriminates some users on the system. Once every few years it revokes your admin privileges for some bogus reasons and tells other users false log readings supposed to show that you’re a danger to the system.

I think your compass is a little bit borked. 🫠

Not quite

You do realise there are many different jurisdictions om this planet, right? Some fight back more valiant against this shit than others.

Of course it’s still up in the air where which law will be introduced, but assuming every single distro or project has to follow the same laws is naive.

Totally fine. The only issue could come from legal implications since the domain registrations are managed by different organisations in different countries (leading to your registration data being an open book with .net domains but most likely unavailable with .nexus). However unless you’re silly enough to host a very gay social media instance using the TLD from god damn Afghanistan you’re probably fine (yes, that happened).

Damn, the Lutris rule is spreading quickly.