Fedora or Mint for noob?
A friend might let me install Linux on his secondary laptop he uses for university. He's not a tinkerer and wants something that just works.
Linux Mint is known for being very user-friendly and stable. Also easy to get help online.
However, in my opinion Mint seems rather outdated, both with its Windows-like workflow, default icons and look and also Xorg. When I tried it I had some screen stuttering I couldn't resolve, probably due to Xorg.
Instead, Fedora with GNOME is very elegant and always uses the newest technologies. It feels and looks actually nice and not outdated. But I'd have to install media codecs via terminal first which suggests that Fedora is for experienced users. Also university wifi eduroam doesn't work on Fedora for me because legacy TLS connection is not supported in Fedora (at least I couldn't get it to work). I'm at a different uni than him tho, so it might work there. In general, less help on the web for Fedora than Mint.
What do you think? (Btw, KDE is too convoluted in my opinion. Manjaro too, it breaks too often. I will not consider it.)
EDIT: From what I've gathered so far, I should probably install Mint. He can try Fedora with a live usb or on my laptop. If he prefers that then I can warn him that this may be less stable and ask what he wants.
I've only tried Ubuntu-based Mint, but LMDE is more future-proof so it will probably be that.
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.
Fedora ships unfiltered Flathub outof the box since quite some time. If easy access to proprietary software is a deciding factor, Fedora is among the easiest options.
Okay, but Mint has Flathub and the deb ecosystem.
It's just straight-up better supported
Random debs don't magically work on all Debian derivatives. Simply getting debs from somewhere is just asking for problems.
Anything that runs on Debian Bookworm works on LMDE 6, anything that works on the latest Ubuntu LTS works on the latest regular Mint
Addon repositories can cause incompatibilities. Random individually downloaded deb package here, some random PPA there, spice it up with the Mint add-on repo to Ubuntu, and you can end up with a broken system (let's say I learned the hard way a good amount of years ago only to combine a few handpicked repos).
Ok so I guess it really just comes down to personal preferences at this point.