Feyter

My best advice is:

Don’t listen too much about what strangers on the Internet say you should do or use.

Non of us has statistics to pull from. Mostly it’s individual experience mixed with personal preferences. All that could be different for someone else. E.g. some people will have problems with Nvidia, other with AMD.

Stick to the basic and add fancy stuff later on.

Don’t pick a distribution because of the Desktop environment. Or because someone said it has a nifty feature. People create new distros all the time just for fun and not because there would be a real reason for it. Looking on the release cycle would probably be the most basic decision you should take. Read about the differences between “rolling release” and “long time support” and decide base on you personal use case.

Have a backup strategy

This is nothing limited to Linux but since you are planing to switch your habits, there is a high possibility you will mess up at some point. Best would be you try to stimulate the worst case and look if you would be able to setup your system in a VM or something.

Don’t be afraid to try things out

Especially when you know that your backup is working. There is not much you can lose. Don’t be afraid of using Arch Linux e.g. just because someone on the Internet said it’s just for pros or something.

So this last one is maybe just the consequences of all the above. But yeah I guess that’s all I could say for now 😅

Maybe it depends on who you ask or where you are. Maybe a US vs EU thing? I never was a professional Musician, but when I started reading about creating/composing music for Video Games I learned that many professional Studios run on Windows because of proprietary standards and software. that is not available for Apple (and Linux)

Really? last time I checked Windows was the dominant player in professional music production but I guess trends can change very quickly.

So there is no real reason preventing Linux to become the domint system at any time.

To be fair this is not a Reddit thing and it can be found in the fediverse too. I can remember some of such situations where a person just posted wrong stuff but in a very confident way. I was able to prove him wrong later but nobody cared anymore.

Ok so I guess it really just comes down to personal preferences at this point.

In general I would recommend any Debian derivate for beginners that just don’t care about how their computer is operating. So if this is really just a question regarding eight Fedora or Linux Mint then I would say Linux Mint because it’s a Debian derivative.

That’s simply because chances are high stat you will at least find a Deb package for any proprietary software you might want to use. Making it “easier” for the user.

If you install the system for your friend you’re free to change the Desctop environment to everything you want.

IDK I thought sandboxing is also something that comes with Flatpak, so security concernes could be a reason to use Flatpak as well.

Having some being worse makes yourself good… Because we are living in a binary world 😉