It's so upsetting that Ubuntu went so hard in on Snaps. I just end up with issues caused by their sandboxing with hardware and config access and you end up having to fight to find a normal .deb install for FF instead of that damn default Snap.
I hope the journey isn't too rough for you though - best of luck!
If you want to easily distribute commercial applications, use flatpak. You could even have your own flatpak repo for your own products, if you wanted (it is really just static http).
I agree that the flatpak/appimage/snap options for apps, and in particular commercial apps is a decent idea. I think integration and permissions should probably move to something similar to the UX for phone apps though... it feels weird having to try to configure permissions that should be in the box.
There's your problem ;)
Mint has been much more user friendly for a long time. I've been on Manjaro for some time now, and I'm quite happy with it.
Basically nothing you’ll want to do is googleable.
I’d recommend arch to a newbie before nix.
Once you get a handle on things, nix is pretty nice.
Debian/Mint/etc. are all good distros, but if you're willing to step up the learning curve just a bit, I'd definitely suggest Gentoo. I've been using it as my daily driver for several years now and it's made me feel like I'm actually in control of my machine (compiling all your code with debug flags so you can attach gdb when it's behaving weird so you can write a patch?! And then submit it to get sucked into upstream!? Yes please!). There's definitely a little work up front, but it's without a doubt the best experience I've had with Linux and I'd recommend it if you're up for it.
IMO Debian is a pretty good choice if you have hardware that's about 2 to 4 years old or more and don't really care about getting the latest driver updates or advances in the Linux ecosystem, so you should have a better experience there, but if it starts to frustrate you that it takes years for huge fixes and advancements to make their way to you, I really enjoy Fedora. :-)
Also, you mentioned two of the major alternative application packaging formats, snap and appimage, but have you heard of our Lord and savior Flatpak? :p It has all of the benefits of snaps (namely sandboxing, consistent environments and packaging dependencies along with applications, updates directly from upstream, distribution agnostic packaging, and automatic integration with your desktop environment) but none of the downsides (namely far better desktop environment integration thanks to portals and much much faster startup times and no perf impact during runtime unlike snaps). A lot of people talk down about them but I think that's mostly FUD.
(Also, having ancient single-purpose laptops is fantastic. I have one for recreational programming, and that's all I use it for. I have another for curating my music collection, and one for games. They don't need to be fast, or up to date, or power efficient, because I don't use them all the time. But when I do use them, it's nice to have them set up just so for the thing I want to use them for.)
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...
Been great.
And in general, desktop Linux is just as buggy and maybe even more half-baked than it was when I started using it in 2007.
But, I own my machines. I don't need to ask permission from a company to be able to log in to my machine. I can install or uninstall whatever the hell I want.
It's not your computer anymore, it's this computer.
Be careful. This is how distros start.
I started with Linux Mint, then Ubuntu. I don't remember which Ubuntu it was, but it had Gnome 2 and then later had fun with the Unity Desktop versions. When they started being the bully, I started distro hopping and then finally settled with Debian (because of my personal values as well). I can't trust a for-profit company to care about its users. Today I try to use as many FOSS alternatives and projects supported by community.
Ubuntu is no better than Windows 11 at this point. It's just lesser evil of two. Try something else, Pop_OS!, Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux, Fedora, etc. Plenty of good options out there. Debian too, if you don't want a solid stable long term OS.
But 2 weeks ago I installed Linux on my home setup to run 24/7.
There's some seriously dumb issues with it: Ubuntu snaps are terrible with no local fonts in FF and other snap-based software has surprising bugs and crashes you don't realise are the fault of snaps until you waste hours researching it, everybody pushes AppImages but you can't get launcher shortcuts without doing it all manually in a friggin .desktop file* (you could do this 30 years ago in Win3.1 without having to search around for an icon!!!), you can't consistently pin stuff to a taskbar, etc.
But I think I'll be sticking with it all the same. Microsoft could ban my Microsoft account and then what, I can't use my PC anymore?!
* Yes I know there's some software you can download to do it but seriously it's not been updated for ages and this should be core OS GUI functionality. I switched to Debian and KDE which at least has more flexibility.