I installed mint on a new laptop recently and it was completely painless. To be fair I’ve used Linux before but it’s been over a decade and I didn’t have any major hiccups. I installed steam and was playing games within 15 minutes of finishing the install. The UI is very familiar and comfortable for windows users and the entire ux seems to be designed around not making you use the terminal unless you have to. I highly recommend trying it out.

It redirects to chapo.chat for me but still has banners and posts that call it hexbear

They’re defederated on .world and probably some other lib instances. I moved to ml because I didn’t like the vibe on world, especially their rabid obsession with “tankies”