I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.

Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.

But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.

That amount of money a month is extremely substantial for an open-source project, and especially for a non-corporate distro. It also far exceeds previous years.

The pressure mostly seems to be from adding wayland support to Cinnamon, combined with perhaps maintaining more projects at too regular an interval than their team can chew.

Might want to read the article first. Mint has received more donations last month than any on record for them, $47,000.