Yeah, I think that's the thought process. And I'm not sure regarding the kernel version, but imo that's the most important thing to stay relatively up to date on.

Yeah, may have been. I haven't been following many distros too closely until the past ~2-3 years.

After thinking some more on this, I think it may actually be preferable to suggest "flavor of the week" distros as long as they have a well supported base distro. In fact, I just thought about something a graphic designer coworker brought up a while back -- he had been looking into Linux and had been hearing good things about a distro I still haven't heard of anywhere but from him. It does kinda look decent: https://getaurora.dev/en/. Given that its base is immutable: Universal Blue, it seems like a solid choice for someone like him, as long as he can run a few graphic-y apps he might wanna use, like Krita and Inkscape, maybe Gimp. I think folks who are younger than me, like this coworker, are more open to picking up new tools instead of just clinging to Adobe garbage no matter what, and that's a really good thing for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole! May be a good idea to let folks like that have a distro more catered to their aesthetic sensibilities. The base distro matters most for sure.

I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad's laptop that's still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed "too insecure" for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers