Linux Distros

My assessment of Linux distros for my use cases. My knowledge of Linux is limited, so anything on this page may not be fully correct.

Overall Recommendation: Linux Mint

I agree with the common viewpoint that Linux Mint is the best introductory Linux distro. I think this is true not only for nontechnical users, but also for users like me: software developers who want their OS to mostly “just work” and not require a lot of fiddling to get working.

Specifically, the benefits of Linux Mint I've seen are:

Easy install
Software store has a wide variety of apps, and it is fully-open source
I've found updates to be reliable
Easy to lock Linux kernel to an older LTS version, important to run on Mac for wireless drivers
Built-in snapshot/restore functionality should help in case of issues (I haven't tested it yet)

The only downsides:

Doesn't support Wayland yet. But that's a totally fine tradeoff to get stability.
Doesn't have as good touch screen support as Ubuntu. But although I have a laptop with touch screen support, this isn't as important to me as the other pros

Alternatives I've Evaluated

Ubuntu

Pros

Good support for touch interfaces, including an on-screen virtual keyboard
Has an official ARM64 edition, which works virtualized on Apple silicon
Supports Wayland

Cons

Snap Store is not fully open-source
Harder to lock Linux kernel to an older LTS version to run on Mac minis

Pop_OS!

Pros

Beginner friendly
Supports Wayland
No Snap Store

Cons

Last time I tried it I ran into an issue where copy/paste didn’t work systemwide
Apps I installed did not show icons in the GUI
touch support

Elementary

Pros

Simple installation and setup
Very polished UI

Cons

Their default store has limited app selection
I ran into errors while applying updates, even when I had not installed much at all
Does not support Wayland

NixOS

Pros

Reproducible system configurations from a single declarative file—this is kind of Nix’s whole thing

Cons

I could not get Mac mini wireless drivers working with it