Mint is lovely, as are all other Linux distros. However, if you want the latest stuff without going off piste and compiling it yourself, then a rolling, bleeding edge distro might appeal to you. You do mention that you have prior Linux experience.
I own a UK based IT company (as you do) with two other partners (I’m MD and not a doctor) and a slack handful of (lovely - obvs) employees. I personally like Arch on my gear. I used to sport Gentoo but my nadgers complained about being overheated too often. I still have a fair few Gentoo VMs lying around the place.
You might like to try a manjaro.org effort - I prefer the Plasma desktop spin (KDE). That’s Arch with a few more GUIs. Their Konsole is quite something with zsh and a very stylish prompt.
So far I have managed to get Linux to work on everything I have access to which is rather a lot of hardware. Back in the day wifi was a bit wanky and there was ndiswrapper but nowadays I generally find that laptops from HPE and Dell are just as well supported with Linux as Windows, often better.
I finally ditched Windows on my stuff at Windows 7 - that was my wife’s laptop - a GPU update screwed up and that was the final straw. She has been an Arch user for a good seven years and could not give a shit about what is running on her laptop, provided it works and does stuff.
Apple is Apple so they impose dumb restrictions on the web client like any other streaming platform (and Cider is just a fancy frontend for this), so I have a Windows VM so I get the full experience.
And for MusicBee? Well, the Linux music player situation is… bad, to say the least. There is basically nothing like MusicBee in the Linux ecosystem right now. And every time I went to Reddit to see what people are going to, it’s people who are not 100% satisfied with the alternative or Linux users gaslighting them into thinking MusicBee sucks and Their Choice is the Better One. I’ve tried other players and none of them scratch the itch for MusicBee for me. Quod Libet comes close with its queries, and Tauon looks gorgeous, but I had performance issues with QL for what I wanted it for, and I had issues with Tauon’s playlist filtering. And as for WINE? Performance is slow, CJK characters don’t show up, and tab dragging results in errors due to WINE not having implemented the functions for it to work. I’m happy to keep a Windows VM for MusicBee.
I realized a long time ago that Ubuntu, Mint, and like almost half the distros out there are all just Debian-based. I can literally just turn one into the other if I want. To me they are about as different from each other as different system themes, all just Debian in various outfits. (Astronaut gun meme: it's ALL Debian?/Always has been...)
So I figured why not just go with the OG? I'm not a gamer, so I don't need the hottest new GPU drivers every week.
There are none, thankfully. Neither work or home. Last things I’ve had to emulate were probably done diagnostic or update sw for cars and some ide bundled compiler horror for some old and obscure microcontroller.
I made the switch a few days ago. At the moment I’m running a dual boot setup as unfortunately I can’t completely drop Windows for work sessions. I settled on Linux Mint as I couldn’t get Nobara (a fedora fork or sth) to run stable.
I have no experience with Linux (except for owning a steam deck and using live CDs some years ago), so I was looking for sth simple and able to run games.
I’ve been doing more tweaking than I thought but that’s mainly due to my hardware, e.g. getting the stream deck and the rodecaster to run. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff while tinkering with all of this and I can recommend Linux Mint due to its ease of use and very large community where someone probably had your exact problem before and even documented it in some way.
Can’t say much about other distros but I don’t think I’ll switch to another any time soon.
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