Honestly, I agree with @StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net
Ok fair enough, but I wouldn't have installed Linux if I had not seen it recommended.
I'm not a computer toucher, but I can follow written advice.
These sorts of posts always scold anyone giving out actual solutions just so being miserable can continue. This cultural thing almost has an end of history type vibe to it. It's also pretty hostile to divergent and often solution focused neurotypes.
Linux evangelism kinda makes sense, no one is spending billions on marketing and ads for it. I think Linux evangelists should ask about use cases first, instead of just posting a generic "use Linux".
i think the first part is skewing the second
having used mint for a year or so before moving on to arch, mint is entirely usable for the average person
you never have to touch a command line, everything is where you would expect it to be if you came from windows, everything a normal user would need is in the official repositories, and the packages are old enough to be stable
the only things i would say would make mint unusable would be; if you have certain laptops which have hardware with bad support, if you wanted to do audio production, or if you have very specific requirements when it comes to what exact programs you use for particular tasks (which would push you out of "average user" imo)
From my experience, there was always some issue with me using "beginner friendly" distros that forced me down the Arch/Gentoo/etc. path, often due to lack of hardware support for newer devices or some feature unsupported in fixed release distros that I needed. I wish Mint offered a KDE version like it used to, and these forks of corporate Linux distros tend to get screwed over in some way and either have to support an abandoned feature or hardware or fix a controversial issue nobody likes, or they don't have the manpower to continue the project. Thus we need more funding and to overthrow capitalism so we can efficiently push for progress and standardization like China has been doing.