Personally, I don’t think anyone new to Linux at this point, who isn’t tech-minded, should be pointed to an X11 environment. So until Mint devs have ported Muffin into a Wayland compositor, I wouldn’t recommend it. They’re used to a shiny experience visually, so I’d go with Plasma 6 running on Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

I use a Beelink SER5, but that’s because I also plan to set it up to be a retro game console, in addition to streaming.

Do this instead to treat name as a locally scoped variable:

foo() {
    local name="$1"
    read -r -p "delete $name (default is no) [y/n]? " choice
    choice="${choice:-n}"
    echo "\$choice: $choice"
}

printf "%s\n" "foo" "bar" "baz" "eggs" "spam" | while read -r name; do
    foo "$name"
done