It's a false flag operation by Antifa to get Republican voters to stay home on election day ;)

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.

You'd let a 4-year-old roam the streets at night with some friends?

For me it's Twix and Sour Patch Kids

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.

Come to Canada, we definitely need as many progressive voters as we can get.

They're called voters.