Because for someone who says "I’m still really green to Linux so I’m not too comfortable just “playing around” with it. … I need something that will initially “just work”.” I can only relate to my experience. I absolutely hated Ubuntu on my first Linux attempt and now I know that the only reason was Gnome. I gave up. Years later I tried Linux mint cinnamon and changed my mind. I then installed more distros than you can shake a stick at and my honest opinion is that none of them holds a candle to mint when it comes to an easy intuitive experience and just working right from the start. Gnome somehow turns a directory with clear subtopics into a cell phone experience. Perhaps many will disagree with me, but will they do so when starting out? Admittedly I might be looking on this as an older person and the young people like their apps to be laid out on the screen as if - just as on a phone - there was no space to explain the purpose and make sub categories in a real menu.
I also think Mint Cinnamon has a look and feel of an old Windows XP or 7. The lower left menu catagorizes software and you including “recent documents”. It may help if you’re older.
I’m part of a group here in Bolivia that is creating our own distro, PluriOS, and one of our goals is to make it as easy as possible for new users, so we decided to base it on Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, which is very close to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Mint has three advantages over other distros: the Cinnamon interface, the Nemo file browser, and it inherits all the user-friendly features from Ubuntu which make it easier to use than Debian, such as automatically detecting if your machine needs proprietary firmware/drivers and offering to download them and telling you what package to install if you type in a command for a program that isn’t installed. It always takes me 15 minutes to figure out how to turn off the annoying system bell every time I do a new Debian install, whereas Ubuntu and all its derivatives like Mint have it turned off by default.
I give the Mint devs a lot of credit for developing the Cinnamon interface. Anyone who grew up with Windows 3/95/XP/7 will instantly understand Cinnamon and its search function in the main menu is fantastic. When I worked on the Aymara translation for Cinnamon, I had to try out all the interface features in Cinnamon, which really made me appreciate how much more flexible it is than the MS Windows 7 interface.
One problem with Cinnamon is that the Grouped Window List applet to display the open windows in the panel can’t handle a lot of open windows. It keeps expanding on top of the other widgets in the panel and then starts putting icons on top of existing icons when it runs out of space. I find occasional problems like that in Cinnamon, because it doesn’t have a huge programming team like GNOME to fix its bugs. However I really dislike the design of the GNOME 3 Shell interface, so I use Cinnamon or XFCE on my machines. I can make Shell usable for me if I install a bunch of plugins, but it generally gets in my way.
The GNOME devs keep removing useful features, and in my opinion they have really screwed up the Nautilus file browser, so I appreciate how the Mint devs forked it in Nemo to return all the useful features. Linus once called the GNOME devs “design Nazis” and I tend to agree when I look at how they hobbled Nautilus, so I always install Nemo on my own machines. Nemo is also better at handling small screens than Nautilus (although that is a feature which the Purism devs are fixing).
Of course it doesn’t take more than a couple minutes to install Cinnamon, Nemo and proprietary firmware/drivers on any distro, but I have run into configuration issues running Cinnamon on Raspberry Pis, because none of the distros I tried offer it as a default interface.