Mint veteran here. You aren’t safe. Nvidia will come for all of us.
Meme aside, they have been pretty stable lately. But 2023-2024 had some pretty iffy drivers for my laptop GPU.
Kernel is on the older side, but safe. You don’t really need to have the latest kernel all the time though. All those 1% performance improvements can wait.
Went Mint > Nobara > Mint. I totally understand your take. It was fun tinkering a bit on mint, but I wanted more by going to Nobara.
I had to reinstall it 3 times. There have been some breakage due to KDE updates and Nvidia drivers, and when you go back from a long day at work and you just want to do some chill gaming, coming back to a non functional setup is a pain, even more when you just wanted to update and it wasn’t your tinkering.
So yeah, not for me. I do still think both have their own place in the world
Actually mint ship free software by default! Although there’s nothing preventing you from downloading more (no please add non free software checkbox)
Nvidia drivers are actually opt-in (it’s actually nouveau by default), so for the average person that should be fine… Personally I need the proprietary drivers for blender so I 'm stuck with it.
Although I don’t see how going to debian would help with anything…