People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?
I think the onboarding and new user experience for Mint could be better, but I think there's one important thing that I think makes Mint a good intro distro: Its Ubuntu base.
If you look up guides for "linux" it usually gives instructions for Ubuntu, which usually also apply to Mint. Likewise, if you look for software downloads you tend to find Ubuntu debs.
I know flatpak fixes these issues to an extent, but I think we're not there yet.
some of those ubuntu instructions that come up jn search results are from as far back as the mail order ubuntu cd era and installing debs directly is a slippery slope