I am happy for the Linux Mint team
Linux Mint as been in development for over 15 years. Its good for them to get some press coverage and positive attention.
As far as I can tell most people switching to Linux Mint are fairly happy with the experience beside some minor Linux quarks.
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And I am not. They stuck with old tech stack and do much of pointless drama. But wish them luck, they has their niche and are quite popular.
I've been using Mint for years now and I'm blissfully unaware of whatever drama is going on, or went on. It's an OS people, not a vanguard of political or philosophical ideology.
Not really, people treat their distros like rednecks with a confederate flag. I’ve always found it worrisome.
Out of curiosity, since I switched from Windows to Mint recently so I'm not married to it just yet - what would be your recommended distro for Windows users that uses a better/newer tech stack? Mint worked out of the box for me, but if love to try other distros too if they're better.
I think OP is talking about Mint's Desktop Environment only.
If Mint works out of the box, pretty much any modern distro will. It's about the kernel, not about an individual distro anymore. There's nothing much special about individual distros except UI, and package management, of which Mint shares the latter with any Debian-based distro.
For the most part there are two things that are important when choosing a distro the "stack" (kernel, drivers, security patches) and "packages" (how often your software gets updated)
For something like Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu LTS, it does major updates of the "stack" every 4 years with just security updates in the meantime. This means that newer hardware may not work fully due to lack of the latest drivers (and even then it's edge cases), but you are getting a very stable base. The packages may also not be the very latest versions. Something like flatpaks can be a healthy compromise where you are getting the latest package updates, but you still have a rock solid stack.
Something like Arch would update it's stack far more often but could potentially not boot with a newer kernel with your hardware eg more risky. Fedora is something that would be a newer stack than Ubuntu LTS but also newer packages. Wouldn't be as new as Arch but would also be more stable as a daily driver.
To add to this, I found that Bazzite was a great middle ground for me, and it worked out of the box for everyday needs as well as gaming, even with my Nvidia card.
I am just now dipping my toes into the Linux desktop life with a Bazzite dual boot. I'm very impressed so far. The Steam Deck finally won me over on the Idea of switching.
I would look at OpenSUSE and try whichever flavor meets your needs. It's more niche than Ubuntu but on vanilla installation is easily as user-friendly. The only downside is that if you start messing with stuff, tutorials are not written with SUSE/zypper in mind as often.
I've been running Tumbleweed with Nvidia drivers for about 6 months and have had basically no issues. Switch between X11Plasma/KDE when I just need something direct, and Wayland/Hyprland when I want to mess about and I've not had to blow everything away yet.