@bugmenot I agree with you a bit on this one. I will admit that using Linux is indeed a lot less user-friendly than Windows. But, assuming you aren't using a DE or video playing software that is total ass, it really should not be a problem on modern distros to do something as simple as play a video. Did he just install all of this stuff? I'm not familiar with "Peppermint" at all but I have used regular Mint, which is a lot more popular -- consider it a worthy successor to Ubuntu without the selling out, if you will -- and while I've had my fair share of trials and tribulations, there are a lot of Nice Things that I like about using Linux. Mostly the ball-strippingly fast bootup time, entirely customizable UI, and general total user control over things like permissions and such.
The biggest problem is that installing Linux is like putting together a car entirely out of parts that you've ordered piecemeal instead of just buying a manufactured one from the dealership. You choose the chassis, then the engine, alternator, battery, fuel tank, wheels, etc. and then you choose all of the wires that bind those things together. If you fuck up once, it can be of little consequence or it can be a gigantic pain in the ass, depending on the thing that failed and how much knowledge you have about hardware and drivers. Distros are designed to solve that problem but very frequently they don't because the software they've packaged together is always community software which may or may not have issues with the hardware you're using. Again, it has gotten better and better over the years, but there's still problems. For instance, the last time I installed Mint I had to remove their stupid community nVidia driver, which was a useless piece of software that did not work at all, and install nVidia's official Linux drivers (yes, they exist, and yes, you should always install the manufacturer's drivers if they are available). I also had to enter some interesting positional offsets in the nVidia configuration tool for X-Windows to get my multi-monitor setup to work, but it wasn't too painful. One of the biggest pains in the ass I suffered was when I found that I really liked a certain desktop theme for my DE, but I wanted to change the colors a bit and make them more like a different theme, so I thought I'd just, you know, hack them together a bit and try to make it work. That took far more time than I originally envisioned (but I did succeed).
I don't begrudge anyone who wants to avail themselves of this frankly quite large burden of failure points by installing an OS like Windows. The saving grace is that Linux is pretty good about telling you what screwed up, and if it doesn't, there is usually some neckbearded ancient sage on the internet who knows exactly what's gone wrong that can help. Which allows hard-headed folks like myself to continue plowing along until they have a nicely-working Linux-based install.