According to Statcounter, Windows 11 held a 55.18% market share in October 2025. That share dropped to 53.7% in November and dropped again in December. Now, Windows 11 holds a 50.73% market share.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
Many are rollback to Windows 10, but Linux is increasing as well.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Mint? Based on Ubuntu 22.04? Seems a hint dated.
No offense, I swear. But I have a buddy who has to support Mint installs for work and it honestly sounds horrible.
Then again, the ease of use is probably worth the time saved setting up Arch.
Edit: It is Pop!_OS that is based on Ubuntu 22.04 not Mint. Ubuntu spinoffs spun me through a loop.
Even if it wasn’t an LTS thing, ‘dated’ means nothing to Linux. Stability but with security fixes is the real win. There’s a hell of a lot of room in the Windows install-base for “needs an os that’s not spying on them, but realistically just uses a web browser.”
Mint is based on 24.04, and will rebase on the next LTS when it’s released.
Alternatively, Linux Mint Debian Edition is based on Debian 13, which is currently newer than 24.04. Good option for non-nvidia users.
It depends on what you’re doing. I’ve got Mint on my laptop and main PC, and the experience is different on both. On the laptop I tend to play Minecraft and do some basic tasks like taking notes and browsing the web. There’s nothing in Mint that really affects that, so it doesn’t hold me back at all.
On the PC though, I’ve got all of my important software, and some of it has had to be installed manually because the Mint repos are outdated. It’s nothing that’s particularly difficult to fix, but I know my way around computers. For your average user, it would be too much.
There are many stops between mint and arch. I’d personally point a new user towards fedora or maybe another Debian distro
The “work” part is probably why you have such a bad view of Mint. It could be any OS, but at work there would be a horror story every day (because theres a lot of people, most cant use computers, etc).
The ease of use and not having it break randomly is why you don’t use Arch for normal people who just need to get stuff done.
Actually I want to delete my comment… 22.04 is actually Pop!_OS not Mint. So I’m really dumb there, admittedly, Ubuntu spinoffs get me a little mixed up.
And the work bit, in truth, I think he could fix it by using a btrfs partition, snapper, and grub-btrfs. Build the machine to automatically take snapshots so if someone breaks it, you can fix it faster.
And yeah, ease of use is important, that was not meant as a criticism instead I pointed out a logical reason why Mint made sense.
Long story short, comment stupid, my bad.
Mint has snapshots available out of the box even with ext4, the welcome screen prompts you to create a snapshot to fallback to if anything goes wrong.