Linux Mint is building a reputation as an easy-to-use, approachable Linux
distro for newbies. I set up an installation for another friend yesterday,
on a brand new machine with a 1TiB SSD, uncontaminated by any Microsoft
OS.

This guy is a little bit beyond a newbie. He wanted to be able to try
another distro on the same machine at some point in the future, should he
choose. So besides doing my usual practice of having the OS on its own
separate partition, I wanted to create a second partition for an
alternative OS, which would remain unused for now.

Found the “advanced” setting in the disk partitioning dialog. Was able to
set up a 60MB UEFI partition, a swap partition of about RAM size, a 60GB
OS partition (should be plenty large enough), another 60GB partition to be
left unused, and all the rest of the drive for the /home (user files)
partition. And then left the installer to go and do the right things with
all of that, which it did.

Distro installers also offer the option of mounting existing partitions
without formatting them, so I know he will be able to install any future
OS into that unused partition, and have it share the same /home, UEFI and
swap areas.

So you see, having easy-to-use defaults does not preclude having the
option for greater control, if the user should want it.