Out of curiousity: what made the OOB experience bad for you? I've always found it extremely easy to use.
- APT randomly breaking and require some CLI magic. - Installing french translation packages was awkward since they we're not part of the official repos. - He unfortunately was running 32bit Mint which is much less fresh when it comes to the repos.
Not bad overall, but I wouldn't throw my Windows for 25 years aunt in there!