In my experience, Snap is frustrating to use, buggy and is opinionated in ways I don't like.

It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.

Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.

(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)

Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.

Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.

I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)

It's not exactly dual GPU, just the Intel CPU has integrated graphics as usual. I'm not surprised if you don't have that, but it has to be the most common desktop setup, and quite common on high-end laptops. Was giving black screen after wake. Probably a solution exists somewhere, but even if I found it, the fact that this was broken out of the box and didn't have a clear fix was already reason enough not to trust it.

The GUI layout of Cinnamon vs KDE vs w/e seems like the main thing people argue about, but it doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at making sure stuff isn't straight up broken.

To be honest I haven't owned a dGPU in almost 20 years, but I've been lead to understand that most users with them use them all the time and ignore their iGPU, unless they're laptop users, in which case they might have to use Nvidia's proprietary drivers from what I understand; the installation of which is something Mint makes straight forward for novices, or so I've been lead to understand. Maybe I'm wrong about some of that.

I definitely agree that KDE vs Cinnamon probably doesn't matter. But I'm afraid I don't think particularly highly of any KDE-first distro; it's great from, for example, OpenSUSE, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to new users for other reasons.

The problem I've got with Ubuntu is they keep doing weird shit like submitting desktop searches to Amazon or putting ads in the motd. They're an erratic organization and I think it's a mistake to send new users in their direction. Mint may not be perfect, but I think it's broadly inoffensive and mild, a good distro to leave a good first impression on a new user fumbling through the process themself.

So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

Imo Ubuntu deserved to lose its users when they switched to Unity, not because Unity sucks (it does) but because it's unacceptable for a newbie-focused OS to rug-pull its entire GUI like that for any reason. But it's still #1, so realistically the leader is going be either Ubuntu or something corp-supported like SteamOS.

> So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

I don't think this is a problem at all. I tend to install Debian from the command line (Arch-style), but from what I remember GNOME is the default DE. DEs are largely a matter of opinion, but I find GNOME to be more polished overall. I do use a few extensions however to recreate a desktop-centric UX (Dock, boot to desktop and a few other tweaks).

Debian is a soft no, because despite being an excellent distro, it defaults to GNOME or the user has to deliberately choose something else, which is a problem for giving distro recommendations to noobs because whe you start tacking on stuff like "and make sure you enable the..." their eyes start to glaze over and you risk them thinking the whole affair sounds more complicated than it really is.

I mean I really do love Debian, if not OpenSUSE I would be using Debian now, but it's not a great distro to suggest for absolute novices.

He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).

You don't have to remove them though, it works fine.

You are right, the snap versions mostly work fine. It's just that there are a lot of annoyances due to the nature of Snap packages (slowness, increased disk space requirements, problematic integration with the rest of the system...), but it definitely is possible to live with them.

My Gentoo system is fully systemd and Wayland based from the start. Might sound like heresy to some users, but it was my decision from the start as I liked how they worked, that they are the future, and that you don’t have to wrangle shell scripts for building an OS. I had used systemd a lot via many Ubuntu servers before, so that helps.