I’ve been having a big think over Linux distros. See, I’ve been looking back at my still-new Linux experience of nine months, and wondering how my own journey can help other people get started with FOSS operating systems. Whenever the topic of a Windows refugee-friendly OS came up, I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.
I always follow that up with a comment about how you don’t have to stick with Linux Mint if you don’t want to. You can do what I did, which is to dip your toe into the Linux distro water and find something that suits you better. But if I’m setting up Linux Mint as “my first Linux distro,” why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?
Not much. Mint generally works very well. It’s not bleeding-edge fresh and is based on Ubuntu. I don’t think it would cause you to be unable to do any of your use cases any more than any other Linux distro - like the kernel level anti-cheat thing for games, or Adobe Creative Suite products. Doesn’t matter which distro you run, those things ain’t gonna work.
I was the same as many others here, started my journey on Mint. I eventually moved to Fedora because I like KDE and wanted quicker package updates and stuff.
Pro-tip: if you need the Adobe suite, give Affinity a try. It works perfectly well on WINE, there’s even a ready-made AppImage on GitHub so you don’t need to configure anything. Just click and run.