I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it's perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don't give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don't want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how "experienced" I get, that's always going to be the case. Maybe I'm just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.

It really isn’t, though

Really? Being sure that your system is essentially unbreakable isn't valuable to beginners? I can't see how. It has massively helped the beginners I have given it to feel safe in tinkering with their system.

It was important to me, one day my arch just decided to not boot anymore, so, i switched to nixos.

Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10

I explained in my comment why cinnamon is a terrible choice for beginners, if you had read it you'd know, why even bother replying to a comment you won't read with such a lazy response?

"Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway."

There's so many reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here's some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:

1. Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
2. Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
3. Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.

and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon... cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don't believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you'll note kde isn't developed on github and that's just a mirror. It's not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn't even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you're SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.

I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don't think it's a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv... it's much more common than you think.

In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they're mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.