It just reliably works for me and family that are not Linux people. Sure, other distros have specialized uses, but many are just lots of meaningless work.
I am a tech lead and have >10y experience, so I can handle Linux perfectly fine. Does not prove my opinion right though. I just think most distros is a waste of time to use and configure. My OS is not something I want to fix or actively maintain, like ever. I just want to do stuff and play games. Mint lets me do that, without having to fix stuff.
I have tried lots of distros and every single one is more work, except maybe Ubuntu. Most users don’t want to maintain their OS, most Linux users at the moment? Maybe.
Yes, always being at the forefront of all software through Arch or another rolling distro is cool, it also means that you might be using less reliable software. Fedora is great in many respects, it is just less flexible. Yes, ostree is cool.
Its just that those things is for those who WANT to tinker with their OS. In the future more of the great stuff will be implemented in Linux Mint, but til then, why bother? (Unless you find joy in it)
We should stop recommending other distros to regular people.
TL;DR People just want an OS that works, not another project. Lets stop recommending all kinds of distros, just go for Mint.
Also, I am trying to create a discussion here, not 100% my opinion.
I will have to disagree. I think what you find intuitive and obvious largely comes down to what you’re used to.
I have very limited experience with Windows, although I did have Windows 3.0 PC in the 1990’s. Windows at that time was basically just a graphical shell on top of DOS. As an OS my system was running DR-DOS, which was basically a DOS compatible CP/M. Rest on my 40 years of computing history has been mostly with either CP/M or Unix-like systems.
With this background I find Windows systems (yes, modern ones included) to be incredibly unintuitive and difficult to maintain. I don’t understand their logic and I find it annoying having to navigate through endless amount of dialogue boxes to accomplish a simple task that would require one command on any Linux.
My point here is that while Linux users perhaps indeed are in their own bubble, so seems very much to be the case with Windows users too. There is no basis for thinking that Windows is somehow inherently easier for everybody. It is not. It’s just what large amount of people are used to, and exrapolating from their own experience (not at all unlike Linux users) they assume that the same perceived easiness must be true for everyone.