So I've had my '14 Mac mini boxed up, gathering dust in the closet these past two years, and I've been considering turning it into a Linux machine. I've been tempted to get a Raspberry Pi on numerous occasions to mess around with Linux, but why do that if I can use a much more powerful and compatible x64 device I already own?

I've never used or installed Linux before so how difficult of a task would that prove to be? Could there be any problems with drivers for such a machine? I'm thinking I'll be trying Mint for my first distro. I suppose I ought to try creating a USB boot drive to test it first before actually nuking the current Mac file system.

Any thoughts or advice is appreciated.

I literally just installed Arch Linux on an old Macbook Pro that my wife had and it was relatively painless. I had to fiddle about a little bit with drivers, but nothing major. Everything works just fine.

I haven't tried Linux on a Mac Mini, but I doubt you would have any serious problems with hardware compatibility. I would definitely recommend trying it with a Live USB, before doing a full install (that's what I did with the laptop). There are loads of resources online that can help.

Although, having said that I don't think I would recommend installing on a Mac as a first experience for someone who is completely new to Linux. The main reason being that the way they boot up is a bit different to most regular PCs and may require some additional tinkering that you wouldn't need to do on a non-mac PC. For the Macbook, I installed the rEFInd boot manager, which is an excellent tool that basically replaces the Mac EFI boot manager and allows dual-booting Mac OS and Linux. This Arch Wiki article is worth a read as well and will give you some idea of what is involved. There is some info specific to the Mac mini at the bottom.

Bear in mind that for a regular PC, it would be pretty much as simple as clicking 'install' in the Live USB menu, but as I said Macs are a little more involved. Although, you should be able to boot up and try the Live USB through the Apple boot manager.

Why not reuse that Mac Mini for other purposes like an HTPC, Plex media server, or a full-time torrenting PC. That'd also save some time learning how to use a new OS too.

I converted my MBP 2012 to an HTPC. Linux is cool and all, but when I used it 10 years ago for school, the UI pissed me off.

Well, the thing about Linux is that the UI is literally something you can replace. Everything from the traditional desktop to simple tiling.

I'm guessing you had a run in with Gnome, the Windows 10 of Linux desktops. Right now I'm using NsCDE, but there's about 30 code viable desktops.

These were school PCs and I believe they were using Ubuntu 10.04. For some reason, we were limited to using Terminal and submitting assignments through SSH. Either way, I was pissed that I had to refer to a user manual for command lines to do the simplest of tasks that I couild easily have done easily with Win 7 at the time.

Anyway, OP, make sure to back up your current macOS before going through. I lost my macOS doing some dual booting shenanigans and had to wait 4-6 hours for my notebook to contact Apple servers to restore the factory OS. Linux Mint + LMDE 4 looks pretty clean IMO.

Well if you're going to learn Linux back up macos drive and go nuts most distros are the same same you can remove desktops install all try all etc it's not like there's a Magic Linux install that's better than any other,
For my convenience sake and less time wasted my main laptop has POP-OS because of the graphics switching works nicely with Nvidia etc, Xubuntu on another and several other laptops with random distros just to see the default state and how well it supports the hardware without going down rabbit holes chasing firmwares and such for sound or other devices.

From my experience with Ubuntu 20.04, it has a decent and mostly complete UI. But if you need to resort to terminal commands, most issues you are likely going to have are detailed in forums which you usually find in the first page of Google with the right words in the search.

To the OP, you may want to test a few distros. Each comes with benefits and issues (just like any other OS), so you may want to test multiple ones to see what you want to deal with.