15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

How is this too long? I would consider it a reasonable amount of time to receive security updates on a computer.

I have a notebook that I bought in 2012. It can run Ubuntu LTS 24.04, which is supported until 2034, without issue. There is no indication that the next release will stop supporting this hardware. I don’t see why Microsoft couldn’t provide this.

Plasma 6 is a significant upgrade for sure, especially on Wayland! I’d rate the crash frequency (on Fedora) at between once per week and once per month ;-)

Join the Debian Trixie upgrade fun today :) https://micronews.debian.org/

True, Linux applications (e.g. apt, dnf, pip, but also rm, sudo, and many more) would be more precise.

For Arch, it’s probably not so easy to define “essential” packages, as it, for example, supports many different bootloaders. It is of course also a question of distro philosophy and target audience. Personally, I’ve noticed that “rm -r” as root prompts for every file on RHEL but does not on Arch…

E: Removing essential system-critical packages is not permitted. This might break the system.

You can still do it if you really want, but even Linux rightly has some protections against breaking your system.

I’d say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I’m using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn’t work on X11, but it hasn’t pushed me to another distro just yet…

For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I’d say that actually something “immutable” like Bazzite might be one of the best options.