I”ve been installing Linux desktops for decades (mostly Ubuntu, but in the day: Suse and RedHat, and Qubes, and FreeBSD and NetBSD, Nix, Arch, etc…) I always check out the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I tried Mint and didn’t see a huge difference. Same sort of belly flops into the shell to make things work, but with a difference skin. It is not fundamentally different than any other distribution with a desktop in my opinion of staring at this for 30+ years.
Honestly I've had more technical problems installing Windows than Linux Mint recently, not to mention the multiple hours spent hunting down and disabling all of the telemetry and ads in Windows. Still can't believe they put ads in File Explorer.