Hahaha, we can always hope.

When OP says "layout" I think he means the old as windows 3.1 layout and workflow. It was good in the 90's. Now it feels cumbersome and dated.

Don't get me wrong. I know that's the main selling point of Mint: Familiarity and stability. I settled on it for 19 years after I got tired of distro hoping. I've contributed financially to it every month for years.

However, it's that cumbersome workflow which got me back into Gnome where I use only two extensions: transparent task bar and window autotile.

Gnome on a laptop flows naturally and out of the way.

Usually the problem is that new users go out of their way to fuck things up.

I don't see anything wrong with that. Most of us did that and that's how we learned. But really, all mainstream distros are good out of the box unless you have an unusual hardware configuration. Specially now with flatpaks, appimages and Snaps.

Of course if you want to tweak and twist KDE or install extensions on Gnome or PPAs from who know where on Ubuntu or overuse the AUR in arch you need to know what you are doing.

However, it's no different in Windows but for different reasons. The most common way to fuck windows up is to start installing software from non reputable sources. I think many of us have had to clean windows installations from friends and family when it becomes unusable.

You don't mention the specifics of your hardware and that's an important consideration.

I was a mint user for more than 10 years. It never crashed. It became my fail back when I moved to Fedora/Gnome. It's very crashed, but my laptop (ThinkPad X1 carbon) supports Fedora out of the box.

People keep saying "a DE you can customize..." While I love KDE, the amount of configuration available means that's it's easy to screw things up.

I suggest Gnome because it has a modern workflow and it's otherwise out of your way. Of course, you can install extensions. Just don't go crazy because extensions may not be as stable as the core.

The GNOME workflow becomes natural after a few minutes.

Removing the word "windows" in the last frame and also "your dad installs it for your dumb mom" to "your parents install a server. Maybe your mom does it or your dad does it. Maybe you can also help!"

Teaching "children" that technical tasks are for dady to do is so cringe.

Those two little changes and it becomes a readable story.

Are you kidding me? They would have renamed all the "St" streets and neighborhoods and removed religious symbols from schools and other public buildings.

But I live in "Ville Marie", Mount royal has a prominent cross, streets have names like Saint Antoine. Near my house there is a public school with a huge religious statue.

Bill 21 is not pro laicity if the state. For that I'd be in favour. But anything Catholic is "tradition" so it gets a pass.

Oh. That's because Christianity is tradition.

They'll find an out the same way they found an out for having religious symbols in public property after bill 21.

Teachers can't wear religious symbols, you see? But schools, hospitals, streets, etc can have prominent religious symbols and names, I mean, if it's Catholic it's tradition, not religion.

But, really, how frequently a normal user borks their system?

I've been using Linux for since 2004 and I can't remember the last time (if any) that I irrecoverably borked the system.

I use arch, mint and Fedora. Repositories in those three are solid.

Yes, immutable systems have their uses. Mostly entreprise uses but for home? Only out of curiosity.

"Usually"

Sure.

But there are custoner managed keys which do exactly what I think it does.

And we here in Canada still ashamed of residential schools. You'd think other countries would have learned.

Wow. I used to be a lead Enterprise architect for a large corporation. We had some clients who explicitly required, by contract, that the data should be hosted in Canada and only accessed by people in Canada. This included the department of National defense.

Microsoft complied by hosting instances in Canada and we went through hoops to ensure data remained in Canada.

This seems to uppend the game. However, all this information should already be encrypted. Whenever it isn't, I'm sure corporations are scrambling to fully encrypt (or de-host) data.

I mean, data (at rest and in transit) encryption has been available for other risk vectors. This seems to be no different. If Microsoft/Amazon/Oracle, etc had a backdoor to unencrypt the data, it would create a higher backslash.

For individual users, I don't think 99% of them care where their data is hosted.

Really? I guess everyone was 15 at some point and hadn't heard that distro wars are useless 🤣

There is no best. Period.