Yeah right. I tried Linux Mint, and I had so many problems I had to switch to KDE Neon. Admittedly like half of them were related to Nvidia, but lots of people have Nvidia.
Even if I’m an outlier, I don’t think you understand what foolproof means. Maybe you set if up for them and they’ve never had to touch it, but most people don’t have that luxury, and also will probably need to touch it at some point.
I’ve never used it with a Nvidia card, was speaking mostly about mine and my family’s experience. I don’t currently know the state of Nvidia support on Mint at this moment, whether with the proprietary or open source drivers, so can’t give you any info on that.
About being foolproof, it’s about being easy to use without having many footguns, not about being bug free.
But how is it easy to use? It’s easy to use once it’s set up I guess, as long as you don’t touch it. But again, most people will need to touch it I feel like, to install some software or something like that. Even if all you do is update every now and then, I have had updates that just completely break things, forcing me to roll back to a Timeshift snapshot, multiple times. I wouldn’t call that easy to use.
I mean, I guess if your family had no major problems, they had no major problems. I just can’t figure out how they would’ve managed that.
What Mint install did you have that had that many issues? Installing apps has been easy for a long time already, just open the app store and pick what you need. Updates is the same thing: app store > update. Whenever something breaks for some reason, there are auto-created rollbacks on the boot menu. My partner is far from being a techie and they managed every daily operation without needing help from my part.
I think we had vastly different experiences, probably because of hardware or release differences, but I never saw the kind of issues you’re commenting :/