Here's to Debian: my most-used and also least-thought-about OS. It just works.

We are all dull men on this blessed day.

I must say, I did go the KDE route. I haven't given gnome a shot in awhile ~ I just recall needing so many gnome extensions. Would you say that's changed?

Right-o, LMDE for my desktop machines, Debian for all my servers. How nature intended it.

There is a Mint Debian Edition that is based on Debian but with the Mint feel. Debian is a bit "lower" on the baseline, meaning more needing to understand Linux. But it's not Arch or Slackware.

Debian is fairly straight forward I think, I'd think maybe a half step behind Ubuntu and mint for being easy and accessible, but mint and Ubuntu both have communities that have a reputation of being extremely friendly to new folks just figuring things out

Just depends on what you need :) like the other reply said, mint debian edition is a great choice built by the mint folks to be very user friendly and with the mint community. Just keep in mind debian gets updates very slowly, so I'd expect mint debian edition to also get slow updates (maybe someone more familiar with it can chime in), which may or may not mater for you. But as a result it has a reputation of being absolutely rock solid (though so does mint. And regular mint is based on ubuntu. All the versions of mint ought to be extremely reliable)

Personally if you like one of Mint's interfaces (desktop environments) I'd probably just start with regular Mint. There are a lot of good options available though :)

Go with Mint. It will be better set up out of the box for gaming. Also, don't dual boot. It will make it more complicated and scarier. Save any important files to a backup location, and rip off the bandaid by completely ditching Windows. You won't miss it.

Mint is super nice. It installs and just runs and Cinnamon is a lovely desktop environment. I'm an absolute casual who has yet to open the terminal.

There are so many distros out there now. Crazy. I have the luxury of many laptops and some SFF systems. This allows me to try out a bunch of different distros and leave them on there to play with when I have the desire or need to. I’ve also loaded up several VMs to sample distros here and there. Recommend a VM environment for dabbling.

I had one Fedora VM break and refuse to boot as it had fallen behind on updates. It had been a coupla months since I logged into it and the application had been working fine. That irritated me greatly, so I loaded up Debian for that application and moved it over. I don’t expect an OS to lock me out like that even if updates are lagging.

I do use Mint on my prime desktop. It’s perfectly cromulent.

I came from fedora & was using debian as a home server. When suddenly some update broke my fedora laptop's USB C dock ~ figured I would give Debian a go & it worked :)

Fed44 broke browser audio and some other stuff never worked too well. Tried CachyOS for the first time and it’s really nice. Supposedly good for gaming. Installed NVIDIA drivers during the default installation.

I don't remember ever having to mess with PPA with Debian. That was all Ubuntu crap, unless I'm mistaken, which happens a lot. I mean, you could add a PPA, but I never saw a reason.