Ubuntu derivative

Is one reason.

DE nobody else seems to be using

Cinnamon is easy to use though. Seamless transition from windows to linux for people who don't know what they are really doing. When they get the hang of it, you can do some neat stuff with it.

Cinnamon is also an in house thing from the Linux Mint developers which is why it's most common there. There's a few other distros that have spins on it. Namely Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, etc.

I dont know what if offers. Other than its very stable and if you ask for help and say you're on mint people are more inclined to help.

Linux on boarding has the same problem as the fediverse. When people first join they dont know where to start and its overwhelming. Thats why its nice to give them a landing pad where they can go and then after using it for a week or so they can move on to other options if thats what they want. Thats why I point people to mint.

Mint requires you to use the terminal the least of any distro I've used. I'm very comfortable with CLI but for people who have only used Windows or MacOS and never ventured beyond the GUI, Mint is the easiest transition because of its plethora of well-integrated GUI tools.

I agree that it's a bad recommendation. That was my first distro and the dated look was a huge turn off and a bad first impression for Linux. It just feels like a downgrade from Windows or MacOS, which makes for a terrible transition.

What Mint offers that many other distros don't is that it generally works well right out of the box, with just the initial install and no other tweaks, because it has proprietary drivers and other bells and whistles pre-installed. But so does Zorin and Pop_OS and both look much better. Those would probably be my top recommendations for a new user. All 3 of those distros have lots of online support (plus the general Ubuntu support that will usually be applicable as well).