Mint develops LMDE as insurance against Ubuntu going away, so even if it someday should, Mint will be able to continue without any major upheavals.
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Emmabuntus is now built on Debian and so far it’s just about the best distro I have found. But then, I won’t mess with anything remotely connected with Arch or anything that doesn’t use .deb packages. My fallback might be LMDE or Peppermint Devuan.
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Our household and former business used LM for many years. I always recommend LM Cinnamon* for first-time wannabe Linux users.
*(MATE will do, but IMHO Cinnamon looks better, plus it looks more like Windows. Or at least the last Windows (7) that we used.)
But I recently switched to Debian 12 KDE Plasma. I love it! It’s a nice change from LM. However, I wouldn’t recommend Debian to a newbie. But I’ve been using various Linux distros for about 30 years.
But if a person who wants to switch from Windows to Linux asked me to recommend a good distro, I would absolutely tell him Linux Mint Cinnamon.
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I agree, Mint/Cinnamon looks after new users well.
Other good choices are MX and Peppermint… they are both
Debian based but easier than raw Debian.
One of the common sticking points with new users is the
install… Debian needs to improve its install, so does LMDE.
Some people would want to mention Ubuntu in this
context. I cant comment, have not used it.
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I think the only time I would recommend Ubuntu is if Canonical got rid of Snaps altogether. The great thing about Linux Mint is they don’t do Snaps out of the bag. Ubuntu without Snaps would be spectacular and can confirm that Ubuntu will do what you ask it to do, it’s very stable too, but Snaps are it’s downfall in my opinion.
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