Zink

Unfortunately I think you are correct.

It's crazy that the people involved for the most noble (to them) reasons are the ones most likely to be pulling triggers and/or getting killed, while the ones starting the war for evil reasons typically come out ahead as long as they are willing to ignore the mountain of bodies in their wake. (cue narrator)

Or as a wise man once said:

Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor? Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor? Why do they always send the poor? Why do they always send the poor?

I think it makes some sense once you take a look at the big picture. Mint has been around for a very long time and has become one of the most popular distributions on its own. On top of that, it is designed to be an easy turnkey system for inexperienced linux users.

That alone would gain it plenty of recommendations, but ubuntu would probably still be the top recommendation. However, the same thing that made it good — Canonical and its resources — is also the thing that drove away the Linux enthusiasts that recommend distros to new users.

So you take Ubuntu, the user friendly distro built on one of the sorta OG distros (debian), strip out the proprietary stuff that annoys the Linux community (snaps etc), and make it even more user friendly while removing none of the Linux goodness, and there you have Mint as the obvious recommendation.

Hell, I’m a computer person and I happily use Mint on multiple computers daily.

Going directly from modern Windows to the Cinnamon desktop in Mint was a distinct improvement!

the average computer user does not even want to think about their operating system. 90%+ of people who use a computer want it to turn on and just work for the things they want to do

I’m the more typical Lemmy user that DOES think about their operating system and will happily fiddle-fuck with it on occasion. And I still use and love Mint because even in 90%+ of the cases when I use the computer it is to do something WITH the computer and not do something TO the computer.

The “it just works” factor is very high with it.

Until you realize that the current distro isn’t the worst like the others were.

That’s when you know you’ve found home.

It even goes beyond that because if you just search how to do something in linux, you are almost guaranteed to find instructions that work on whatever random site you find. It’s pretty rare to find instructions for dnf or pacman without also having the APT instructions right there.

Games run great in Linux Mint.

Mint also has a GUI driver manager that makes it really easy to see and change which nvidia driver you’re using.

I freaking love Linux Mint. I use it for myself because despite being the “easy” distro, it is still Linux. (Or as I like to call it, GNU plus Linux, lol) But you are still allowed to use the terminal, compile your own code, fiddle with your system, run docker, and generally do what you want with your computer without it bogging down to load ads for services that are already running in the background bogging it down more whether you pay for it or not. And since it is based on debian/ubuntu/apt, users benefit from that popularity when they look up how to do something.

I love it just as much for the non-power users. It is how I will allow my parents to keep their perfectly good laptop that collects dust instead of spending a thousand bucks on a new win11 laptop to collect dust.

Long term I assume that I will end up on Arch or a derivative, mostly thanks to Valve, on top of it being a good project to learn on.

The wrong one, obviously!

This is me too. I love my home. I’ve lived here a long time and have made this my ideal little place on the planet.

I can be ridiculously hyperfocused and productive on my personal hobby projects at home. However, I cannot get jack shit done for work. I still like to work from home fairly often, but I go into the office on a regular basis. Fortunately, I live close to the office.

USian here, and totally agree. The willful ignorance is stunning to behold.

But help me with my potential ignorance here - is this meme also suggesting that ordinary citizens of other developed countries know about these things? Do high school history and social studies classes have a day or a week that discuss US imperialism & shady dealings of recent decades?

My impression has always been that people in other countries read about this awful shit in the same places I do online, and that the differences in mainstream knowledge are about much more basic stuff like coal and climate change being bad while healthcare is good.