i cut my teeth on linux mint with cinnamon before moving to garuda dragonized. it was my daily driver for the last four years, then i switched to proxmox and just run everything on VMs 🤷

lots of resources and documentation available for mint, but it’s pretty turnkey. best advice i’d give to a newfriend is make sure you read any articles or documentation start to finish, instead of trying to follow along. also, employ good backups practice: learn what timeshift/snappy is, how it works, and how to use it.

taking a backup before making big changes has saved my ass more than once