Highly skilled people want to become farmers but can’t afford it.
Capitalism has come full circle.

IMO It’s mostly about the mindset.
If you realize that you can basically do anything on any general purpose distro because they’re all just distributions of the available Linux-compatible software, you’re not a noob anymore.
The effort to achieve what you want can be higher on some and zero on others (if that thing already happens to be pre-installed and configured to your liking).
But if you’ve decided on a distro you like, you always have ways of accessing the software that’s missing out of the box.

I’d say, you’re not a noob anymore if you know basic command line best practices (like not copy/pasting commands with “sudo” in front off the internet unless you know what they do), can parse a man page, and know how to find and install software that’s missing in your distro’s repos.
That being said, it’s perfectly possible to run Linux without using the command line at all, nowadays.

You’re talking about declarative systems like Nix. Immutable just means that the root filesystem is read-only. You can install programs as Flatpaks or inside a container (toolbox on Silverblue).

Generally I use my computer to launch programs that do the stuff I want to do, or edit my files.
My files are in /home and programs for the tasks I need are available as flatpaks.
So I don’t need to rummage around in the rest of the file system. You could call it “a laptop for grandma” except I’m not that old. I use my laptop for office stuff, gaming, photo editing, streaming music and video, browsing, mail, messaging, ssh’ing into my servers, etc. What I don’t use it for anymore is tinkering with my OS. I’m fine with default Gnome and I don’t need to adjust every little thing, I can just adjust myself a bit to how the GUI works.
I just don’t want to read Arch news before I update weekly, set apt-pinning priorities to disable snap, deal with recommended dependencies, meta packages, mirrorlists, third-party repo urls, gpg keyfiles, file permissions, executable flags, systemd services, and all that jazz anymore.

Switched to an immutable system after I finally managed to wrap my head around the concept.
I’ve tried it before but left frustrated cause my normal workflow doesn’t apply anymore.
But if you’re looking for an OS that basically disappears in the background, it’s great. I even removed the terminal cause I have no use for it on my laptop.

I’m considering installing Fedora Silverblue on my dad’s PC. Install Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice as Flatpaks, show him the software center, set up his printer and wifi, set updates to automatic with no notifications, and hide the terminal from Gnome menus.
It would be like a debloated phone OS that requires no maintenance at all.

Im just not sure if updates are reliable enough to work without intervention.

That’s still the honeymoon period

I use Fedora Silverblue which actively discourages using the terminal.
In fact I hid it from the gnome application menu since I can’t think of a reason to ever use it.

(I know)

I don’t. What’s wrong with Plasma on Arch?

If Linux Mint is practically the same as Debian, then most Distro’s are practically the same (which is actually true).

I’m on Fedora Silverblue and I’m pretty sure my distro-hopping days are over. After 20 years of tinkering I really like an OS that requires literally no maintenance and basically just disappears in the background.

I made the right choice then. The only thing I changed on Silverblue was hiding the pre-installed Firefox and replacing it with the Flathub version that includes non-free codecs.
And I was surprised to see it’s missing gparted and gnome-tweaks, but I work around that with gnome-disk-utility and dconf-editor.

If it doesn’t need to access root files, you install it inside a container.
toolbox create
toolbox enter
Takes just a few seconds and now you’re inside a traditional Fedora 40 CLI system that can access your /home but otherwise has a separate file system. This is great for setting up a dev environment without polluting the host system.

If it does need to access root files, you can install it with rpm-ostree, which basically creates a new OS image that contains the app.
rpm-ostree install --apply-live [package name]
But if you feel like you need that a lot, a traditional Linux system would be a better fit.

The way I use Silverblue is kinda like Android. All the apps I need for my general purpose laptop are available as flatpaks. The OS itself kind of disappears in the background. I set it to update itself automatically without telling me and I actually don’t do anything with the terminal or outside of /home . The OS is a GUI application launcher, which is exactly what I was looking for after 20 years of tinkering with Linux.

What’s the difference between Bluefin and Silverblue?
I was interested in the Ublue images but it sounded like Silverblue is kind of the “default vanilla favor” and the Ublue images stack more stuff on top or modify it for special use cases. So I’m now on Silverblue, and it’s pretty fucking awesome as a “forget it’s even there” general purpose laptop OS so far.

You don’t need to reply anymore, the bots do that for you.
Just relax and enjoy the ads content.

Btw, you might be interested in https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Sadly, it doesn’t show any posts for me, after setting it up according to the readme. The search continues.

The answer to your question is that all the info is in chat apps now

Get with the times. When Google isn’t a useful tool anymore, use a different one.
Curate and maintain your own list of links to official documentation.
I think we’re almost at a point where having a library of books next to your workstation would be beneficial again.

I’m convinced dark mode users just haven’t got the memo that today’s screens are much brighter than old CRTs and need to be adjusted.
My screen brightness is usually at ~20% on a sunny day and at 1% when I’m in a dark room.
100% is for when the sun shines directly onto your screen.