This is purely subjective and depends on whom you’re talking to. While I’ve had series of burn out stages with free software development and maintenance, I only distanced myself from writing code but not the community altogether. I also only work for orgs that are run by volunteers not by companies so theres that. If you work on projects that are led by a company, you’ll always feel like you’re being used because there’s no sense of belonging.
Just use the live installer, it includes the calamares installer which is as simple as installation in mint.
Wdym not user friendly? I use Debian everyday and the stuff you were talking about dates back to the bullseye days.
Trixie is a lot more user friendly and even includes the calamares installer now which is a GUI installer that’s similar to mint’s one
It also comes with gnome software and you can enable flatpaks with 2 commands. I don’t see how that’s not user friendly in any way.
Of course nonfree software is a different case but you can always use snap or flatpak for it
Debian is a stable operating system and as user friendly as mint once you get past the installation.
Mint also uses a Ubuntu base but Debian has better quality of packages and is less likely to break.
LMDE is also a good option in this case
Most folks I know don’t know the existence of security updates or Windows 10’s EOL so they just keep using it. Even if I told them about the EOL their pcs wouldn’t run Windows 11 nor they’re interested in Linux
A MacBook costs $1000 in my country for the base model and iPad costs $300 for the base A16 model. For someone who does only digital art , graphic design or watching conten, a $300 iPad is more than enough.
A touchscreen MacBook would bump the base price of it to more than $1300