Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful oper

Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems. As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux. I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint. I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing. Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint. I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.