Awesome! I haven't looked at mint in quite a few years, but I would recommend cinnamon as the default.

MATE and XFCE are mostly targeted towards older hardware.

That's not a feature of Ubuntu, more so the installer itself. I'm sure many distros, especially Ubuntu-based one will ship with the exact same installer. Idk if mint uses the same installer, but it would really surprise me that the option isn't available.

Thankfully it's pretty easy to confirm by yourself. Grab a USB key, flash the ISO and have a look at it!

Yes, any distro with a live ISO will allow you to try it on a USB and dual boot if you want.

I'm pretty sure he means other people at his uni use instagram and the likes. Signal/Simplex/etc. is great, but at the end of the day, sometimes you don't have a choice and must use what everybody else is using.

It's not because everybody should be using these apps that they will. If you have a group project and people want to communicate on messenger, that's what you are gonna do. Not doing so would make you insufferable and no one would want to work with someone that imposes his choices on the group.

Well, maybe. My explanation was an oversimplification.

You can always try it and see for yourself (in a VM of course).

In Linux, the root of the filesystem is /

The command would remove recursively every file/directory in the filesystem, essentially nuking the whole system.

You could use debian testing. It's a somewhat "rolling-release" model. You will get more up to date packages with more stability too.

You could also use unstable, but I wouldn't recommend it personally.

Edit: if you really need the most up to date version of some packages, you can pin them to use the unstable repo. This would be a pretty reasonable solution.