Mint cuz of the ecosystem and compatability, my only major issue with it was the outdated drivers, but I installed the kisak Mesa PPA and was off to the races :D. Mint also has really good flatpak integration so you basically get everything a normal soy user like me needs 😜

Reading these comments are making me want to try Fedora from Zorin. Ugh but then distro hopping feels like im just procrastinating from getting work done when Zorin OS has all I need, cool gnome customization, and apt which im used to.

I chose mint as I’m a relatively new linux user, and my understanding is that the learning curve is a lot nice for mint.

Personally I think its mostly a matter of preference and doesn’t matter all that much. I like to run a fairly stock desktop environment with minimal tweaking so my setup aligns with what receives the most QA/testing and that means I generally pick distro based on the desktop environment they ship, how much I like their defaults, and how much information there is to find online.

I like vanilla Gnome so Fedora is a great pick. I was never super into how cinnamon looked so I never really gave mint a big try, though I did daily drive ubuntu budgie for a few years and liked my experience with that. Whether I am using yum, apt, pacman or dnf isn’t really that big a deal, they all work. Several years managing redhat servers professionally has given me a lot of comfort troubleshooting in that setting so I tend to go for Fedora. Also a nice bonus to have more recent software available without jumping through hoops.

I do want to try out Pop OS and a few others and its cool to distro hop, but generally I just kind of like stock Fedora a LOT so I am not really that tempted to revisit other options and have to get all set up with a different workflow.

I think that it’s worth trying both- Fedora is a little more involved than Mint but tends to ship the most cutting edge-stuff, whereas Mint is well-integrated with Cinnamon and fairly user-friendly.