Although it’s not considered officially supported, you can absolutely install it on your PC. It’s been working great for me. The only hangup was disabling read-only mode for editing the OS and changing the default boot up behavior (start in desktop, not big screen mode). Other than those two things, it’s pretty much been plug and play.

1. Not usually a problem for most people, and flatpaks are built into the very slick and reliable GUI store to access newer versions.
2. Legitimate issue for people who need those features, though the Wayland cinnamon session is making good progress.
3. Those are fairly advanced features that most average users won’t take advantage of. Cinnamon actually has pretty fantastic widgets/extensions.
4. Having a familiar windows-like interface is an advantage for first time users, making the transition far smoother. Different paradigms can be explored after they are comfortable with Linux.

For people dipping their toes into Linux, mint still has everyone beat. No other distro has such a polished onboarding experience, which already experienced Linux users tend to overlook.

1. The welcome screen perfectly walks new users getting their system set up and usable, in particular it makes the GUI driver installer front and center to avoid Nvidia users trying to install the driver from the Nvidia website.
2. The polish and stability of the updater tool and GUI store are not to be underestimated. KDE’s discover is clunky and Gnome’s software store is extremely slow in comparison.
3. Every common use case is covered out of the box. There will be no hunting for codecs, filesystem support, firewall, samba, etc, which can be a problem on other other distro like Debian, Fedora, or Opensuse.
4. Maintainence is simple, updates aren’t super frequent (important on internet limited areas), guides written forba newbie perspective are plentiful, most commercial software not in the repos will offer a simple .deb installer package.

All of those things are critical to not burning a new user, and so far nothing has approached Mint’s mastery of onboarding, IMHO.

1. Very true
2. Wayland still has a lot of problems to iron out, and that’s not something that will fly with most people as a Windows replacement.
3. KDE and Gnome are bloated messes that have 29394 ways of doing anything, but not everything, which causes frustration in new migrants. They don’t want 12 different apps that each can do 70% of the possible options- they want one app that can do 100% (and isn’t terminal). Familiarity with windows is also a plus to them, as a migrant.
4. Again, familiarity is a good thing for a migrant.

You’re looking at it from the perspective of ‘is this the distro that has things I want’ which is, not to be rude, completely useless to the person actually migrating from windows.

I was a long time mint user. And I loved it for a couple of years.

But cinnamon just doesn’t really do it for me anymore. I’ve been using fedora kde for a bit and while it’s alright, I had issues with really shitty frame rates in like every game with my nvidia card. I think kubuntu may be my new seeet spot soon.

Although opensuse does seem very interesting too. I should give that a go.

As in you have a fully operational Windows installation that you can boot into, alongside another fully bootable OS?

Because that would be incredibly useful, but I was damned if could work it out.

It’s not a big issue for someone technically inclined, but we often lose sight of how much of a barrier things like that can be for a more average user, who is also completely new to Linux. It’s not going to leave a good taste in their mouth to have to figure this stuff out right off, compared to Windows where it just works. That’s not to mention the increased difficulty of installing the Nvidia driver in either Opensuse, Fedora, or even standard Debian. To someone who has never had to install a new repo or use the command-line, it’s likely going to feel daunting and a big step back compared to windows, even if to us it’s no big deal.

At the end of the day, Mint just doesn’t have those problems to solve, and doesn’t really have many practical downsides for most users, which makes it the ideal on boarding experience with the least friction, and thus the highest chance of a new user sticking with it.

Though I do think Fedora now has an “install nonfree repos” checkbox on install

Unfortunately that option only provides some non-free codecs, I still couldn’t play some video files when I tried it. I recall it took installing the VLC Flatpak (and ensure it’s not a Flatpak from the Fedora flatpaks repo, which bring their own problems), before I could finally play certain videos, but I already knew enough to even try that. A newbie probably wouldn’t know that the flatpak version would have its own codecs bundled in, and would have to do further research to figure out why a video isn’t playing even after enabling the non-free codec option in the install.

Idk I don’t think windows users are as mentally handicapped as both we and those windows users themselves like to pretend, I think they’re just lazy.

Excluding like the elderly and stuff who barely know more than a pen and paper, and seemingly now children who have never used anything but an iphone, but like, average people? I’d expect they can “learn things,” yes. Tbh windows isn’t as “just works” as advertised either and they likely already have to learn something every now and again (though then again every fix for windows after 8 seems to boil down to “reinstall it loser” so maybe not.)

The culture of immediacy has been such a detriment on our society.

So basically, TPM is a secure bit of hardware on the mobo, that allow it to do data encryption, software signing, integrity checks, etc. All that is fine, good even, and Linux fully supports TPM modules, because there’s a lot of good you can do with it, especially the fact that’s in a hardware encrypted key store. Those ‘secure enclaves’ are HUGE for security.

The problem is how windows controls it. Basically, TPM 2.0 can store a bunch of hash values of various parts of your system- bios, bootloader, kernel, etc. It can use this to ensure nothing has been tampered with. it can also enable ‘secure boot’ which is basically to ensure only signed, confirmed software is loaded as the bootloader. Finally, disk encryption can be run through TPM 2.0.

Again, none of these things are bad… if YOU control the TPM module. But on Windows, you don’t, windows or your OEM does. You don’t get to boot your system without their permission. You don’t get to unlock your hard drive without their permission. You don’t get to change OSs without their permission. And finally, you don’t even get to change hardware without their permission!

You can see how it’s a problem when your OEM or windows itself controls that kind of thing regarding your PC. For right now, these problems mainly seem to occur in enterprise or OEM pcs, not prebuilts or custom-builts… but Windows gets greedier by the day, and frankly so do OEMs.

The goal is to turn away from decades of computer innovation and lock down and control your computer worse than your phone is now. You can already see the effects- Windows has started calling installing your own software ‘sideloading,’ for example, and making scary noises about how installing anything from outside the windows store inherently dangerous.

tl;dr: Companies hate the idea of you actually owning your pc, and TPM 2.0 is just another thing they’re using for stripping that control away from you, bit by bit, in the name of ‘security.’

I’m not well versed on the reasons, but I see that AI is mentioned frequently when TPM is brought up in Windows 11… probably because of that new rewind feature that’s pretty much surveillance baked into your pc, they probably need that to be ultra secure.

It seems like maybe they have done this because it’s maybe necessary, but only for features that no one wanted anyways.

There should be a choice and a warning if you don’t have TPM, along with disabling invasive “features” that could have it’s data stolen, otherwise they are signing off on what is probably thousands of tons of ewaste.

I believe there are ways to get around this requirement, but then you are running in an unsupported use case and I wouldn’t be surprised if they brick your OS randomly one day with an unrelated (or maybe related) patch.