Avoid Ubuntu - it's made by the Microsoft of the Linux world. If you want an easy transition from Windows specifically, then you really ought to run KDE Plasma as your desktop environment, as that is by far the most similar to Windows in terms of look, layout and workflow, and it is very flexible in what can be changed and adjusted. GNOME is the other big one, but it feels more Mac-like or tablet-like.

It's preferable to pick one of those two, as they support the modern Wayland protocol, whereas other desktop environments still only support X11 or only partially support Wayland - I don't want to infodump on you right now, but suffice to say that Wayland is more secure, and is widely regarded as the future of Linux, while the old X11 has security issues, and is only in maintenance mode now.

Mint, for whatever reason, and unlike almost every other distro, doesn't come with KDE Plasma as an option. I would recommend Fedora - it's very solid and well developed, an all purposes workhorse that can do anything you need it to, and it's a first class citizen anywhere, since it is one of the most commonly used distros by far. My runner-up would be OpenSUSE. If you're dead set on something Ubuntu-based, then I would take a look at Tuxedo OS, or perhaps just going back to the roots, and install Debian.

Linux Mint is a fantastic place to start (I would say the best place, personally). It's especially good if you use an Nvidia card, as it makes the driver install trivial with the built-in driver installer tool.

If you don't use an Nvidia card, I'd personally recommend going with the Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Got it down to Ubuntu or Mint

Mint is good. Avoid Ubuntu; snaps just make your life hard. You don't need to know what those are, and if you avoid Ubuntu you never will need to know.

It can be hard to convince partners and family, so congrats on the success. My partner worked in IT support but is not a computer person and does not own a PC. I simply provide a family Linux computer and some hosted services to be used by anyone in the family, usually EndeavorOS with KDE. They are aware of world happenings to understand why it is important and the biggest complaint I received was that I need to apply more scaling because the text is too small. :D

With all that said, I think both our situations are anomalous, though becoming more common.

Go with Mint, Pop!_Os, or Bazzite.

Ubuntu is only really a good choice if you want corporate/business level support. And even then there are other options.

'you guys are paying for subscriptions?'

Those are how to install Linux inside windows.

I tried looking it up myself just now, but I'm not really able to find anything that would indicate you'd have a bad time on Mint with your 5070 TI. There was one guy on the Nvidia forum that said he was having a bunch of problems, but turned out his BIOS was the culprit. Another person who reported a problem on the mint forums discovered that his card was outputting to his secondary monitor which happened to be off.

Support for the 5070ti was added in the 6.1 Linux kernel, while the latest version of Mint defaults to 6.12 now. You should be able to install it and then install the latest 580 Nvidia driver from the Driver Installer tool and be off to the races without any real trouble, at least from what I read.

System 76 (Linux laptop maker) now ships a laptop with a 5070 Ti, so I'd be quite surprised if you encountered significant issues.

I recently poked around online to see if my rtx5070ti would be supported and found a bunch of people facing issues, and that Mint and Ubuntu weren't recommended.

No idea what you could have been reading, but by and large, there's very little difference between distros when it comes to GPU drivers.

However, if you want the smoothest experience, then just use a distro that comes with drivers that install with the OS. Best one I can recommend is Bazzite. You won't have to mess around with GPU drivers at all and it doesn't matter which Nvidia card you have, they all use the exact same drivers.