Mint. They can stay on the same release for 5 years, if they desire, or upgrade every 2 if they want. Binary-only drivers are easily integrated, it has a polished experience, integrated backups, and anyone that has used Windows can navigate Cinnamon relatively easily.

They’re both terrible choices for a beginner - constant version churn every six months confuses newcomers, some initial brokenness after every new release - Fedora would be the last distro I’d install.

Mint, without question. A polished, conservative, stable experience with Ubuntu’s broad compatibility baked in, and a familiar desktop experience. Few other distributions can deliver that. I’m very technical myself, but past the age of wanting to tinker with every little thing; I jist want an OS that is stable and gets out of my way to let me get things done - and Mint delivers.

Other than backwards compatibility with previous IRC clients, is there anything IRCv3 brings that something like Matrix doesn’t do? Despite myself being a pretty prolific EFnet’er 15-20 years ago, most of the world has moved from IRC and I question the value of splitting resources across too many different efforts, when I think we’d be better off if everyone adopting a federated protocol like Matrix; which I believe covers pretty much all of the IRC use cases in addition to a number of others.