People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?
Even if Fedora has a spin with the same DE, from my experience, Mint/Ubuntu still has a higher chance just work on a given system.
I love Fedora and use it pretty much exclusively, but the out of the box experience of Mint and Ubuntu is still a bit better for the average user imho.