You don't mention the specifics of your hardware and that's an important consideration.

I was a mint user for more than 10 years. It never crashed. It became my fail back when I moved to Fedora/Gnome. It's very crashed, but my laptop (ThinkPad X1 carbon) supports Fedora out of the box.

People keep saying "a DE you can customize..." While I love KDE, the amount of configuration available means that's it's easy to screw things up.

I suggest Gnome because it has a modern workflow and it's otherwise out of your way. Of course, you can install extensions. Just don't go crazy because extensions may not be as stable as the core.

The GNOME workflow becomes natural after a few minutes.