F-that! Take pride... Mint is ridiculously good. Well managed, stable, "just works" and yet has all the capabilities you want, including auto-running near the edge for current kernels (backed down to stable) without doing jack. You can run at the bleeding edge if you want to manage it yourself.

And for any haters - here's my take: I've been working with Unix for 30+ years, I installed Slackware off of floppies when 16MB of RAM was god-like. I have built, compiled and managed nearly every distro at some point certainly the upstream giants. I've been there for the birth of all of them. I've also professionally worked on AIX, SunOS/Solaris, HPUX. Yes there's a lot of fun in maintaining and running things to your satisfaction, but when you hit a certain inflection point of balancing your real life and maintaining distros across multiple machines and decide "This is the way" - Mint just fits the bill on so many levels.

Mint is the bomb and I'm done pretending. Fight me (not you, OP, you're cool)

All my homies love mint, just because it's friendly doesn't mean it's bad!

Mint is the basic bitch of distros. Sure she shows up in fugly ugs, leggings, gripping a pumpkin spice drank. But she shows up! Works hard. That girl fucks! Make no mistake, basic bitches make the world go round.

Mint is the shit!

Mint works pretty well! I've never been much of a power user so using its GUI (Cinnamon 'cause I failed miserably at running KDE) to update and install certain programs is pretty convenient.

Mint power

the only objective problem mint has is that it's so good I struggle to get people I convinced to install it to be interested in other distros and stuff. And that's fine.

Mint is a solid choice and the one I recommend to anyone who just wants something that works or doesn't care about having several choices, and even when someone wants to explore more options I always include Mint. It just works, it's easy to install that even my non-tech savvy mother on a phone call with me managed to install it and Cinnamon has just enough customization options ootb to make it yours without being overwhelming to a noob like KDE.

I personally don't use it cause I am not the biggest fan of using GUIs, debian derivatives and I prefer KDE plasma so I just go with other options (currently Fedora 40, been using Arch and NixOS a lot before this), however even in my case I could most likely turn LM into what I want with some effort (I just don't see the point in doing that), and my father who has been using Linux since Kernel 1.0 and is definitely a power user swears by it.