I don’t know what issues you’ve had, but when it works it’s nice, simple, and easy to use. It’s well-documented and has a dedicated helpful community. You use popos in your example. Mint is primarily recommended as a beginner distro because from a design standpoint it is the most “considerate” of new users. For example, the software managers. Mint has a clear distinction between programs being flatpaks and system packages, as well as displaying a star rating so users can have a better idea of what they are getting. The pop shop doesn’t make this quite as clear, you can see permissions of flatpaks if you click on one, but it doesn’t tell you that is one before you click on it. Take vlc as an example, look for it in the pop shop and find the flatpak one. It will display 2 of the same program, and users are most likely just going to get the first one they see. The only difference between the two pages is that the flatpak one displays at the top that it has system file access. This isn’t very good if you need specifically a system package and don’t know the distinction. There is also no star ratings on the pop shop, and doesn’t come with the ubuntu system package repositories either. You’d have to add them yourself if pop and flatpak don’t have what you want. Mint at the very least gives you access to ubuntu repositories, so anything you can get on ubuntu you can get on mint. The same doesn’t apply to pop. It has most things you’d want. But if there’s anything specific not in pop’s repository or flatpak, it takes away the convenience. I was streaming my screen last week and was messing with popos on a vm. My arch friend watches a lot of anime through a cli program called ani-cli, so he suggested trying to install that on pop. I myself found it in mint’s software manager, install was easy because it’s in the ubuntu repository. But it isn’t in pop’s, so it doesn’t show in the pop shop. I try sudo apt install ani-cli. Can’t find it. So, I was required to get it from the github and needed 2 dependencies. Fzf and mpv. Ani-cli requires the system package version, so I had to find the correct one. I’m immediately met with an error. It tells me to do a command, I do it, it works. It’s installed. I try searching for fzf in the pop shop and couldn’t find it. But it was installable through apt at least. And then I could finally get the program to work. It’s niche, but I figure I should at least provide an example of what I mean. It’s not likely this would happen to a beginner, but there is a chance, damaging pop’s beginner friendliness. I could not imagine a total newbie having any idea what to do in my shoes. Especially if they suck at using windows. Encountering a problem like this is alien to a new user. So, it’s typically better to recommend a distro to them that doesn’t have them, or keeps them to a minimum. A good metric for how beginner friendly a distro is would be “how often have you had to use the terminal to do something.” On mint, I have never “had” to use the terminal. I do use it, but there’s nothing that requires me to do so. So I’d rate mint’s beginner friendliness highly. It has major downsides like slower kernel and gpu driver updates, thus being less compatible with newer hardware. Which is what popos, fedora, and arch excel at. Not as friendly, but more compatible with more things. Even so, mint is still compatible with MOST hardware, still making it an easy pick.