Serious question , my laptop is getting old. 7-8, years now I don't want to put money in tech for w new one. I want to use it with Linux , as I just use for very Norma stuff and Zero gaming. My use cases will be use of office, use if browsers, simple image editors, pdf reader and manipulation, copying images from to and from HDD , copying media to HDD etc. Connecting iPhone, android for file uploading download etc.

I don't want hassle of

1. Find a reaposiroty, install an extra ackages except for softwares
2. Give any command viq terminal. 3.find any dependency for ANYTHING
3. Use it as regular person

What Linux will just work? I mean simple install and start using.

Why don't Windows/MacOS need snaps/flatpak?

linux mint is based

Does Mint support arm64 yet? I would be ecstatic for a mint VM in parallels on my MacBook but last time I tried I couldn’t I don’t think. Stock Ubuntu is just.. okay but I always loved the out of box experience and look and feel of mint it was my choice for dual booting years ago on old windows laptops

on my office machine: I have Ubuntu(23.10) in its full glory. it is a good distro. I really enjoy gnome shell with Wayland.

on my home machine: I won't let a single proprietary prpgram exist on my Debian. and the only wm would be i3(with xfce as a backup, and as a source of other common programs like terminal).

I've used mint in my university(default distro there), which I also enjoyed for its familiarity to users coming from proprietary operations systems.

my foray into GNU/Linux(from w*ndows) was thanks to Tails, which made me appreciate how different an OS can be(actually, my first computer had Ubuntu 4.10. the computer lasted for less than 2 years. hence I don't count it).

and I've also helped many friends set-up distros like zorin and peppermint.

at the end of day, no matter the distro, it's GNU/Linux. and that's all that matters.

I've tested over 40 Linux distributions over a long span of time, but I've never tried Mint. The reason being that all three times I've read something nice that inspired me to try it again the download hashes don't match, and we find out their servers were compromised. How's that going?

So Mint is Ubuntu based right? If Ubuntu screws up even more doesn't that affect Mint as well?