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 Linux on Intel Macs 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 [[Linux on Apple silicon|on Apple silicon]]

Cons

• Snap Store, the official store, has server components that are proprietary and not open source

Pop!_OS

Pros

• Beginner friendly
• Wayland
• No snap store

Cons

• I ran into issues with missing icons and with pasting not working
• No touch support

elementary OS

Pros

• Nice cohesive UI

Cons

• App selection in the official store appears to be a curated collection that fits with the OS, but it’s not necessarily the most common Linux apps
• No Wayland support
• I ran into errors when updating packages

NixOS

Pros

• Everything in a unified config file simplifies system maintenance

Cons

• No simple way I could find to get Mac mini wifi support