Mint's a great introduction to Linux. when I switched to Linux I started on Mint and stayed on it for a couple weeks before moving on to something else.

Distro hoping on Linux is quite easy. a few years on and I still do it to this day if something new comes out that I want to try.

I always say, people starting out should just go to mint. It’s the lowest friction option, and will work fine for just about every use case. Like, there is a whole world of cool stuff to try out, but that’s for after someone has an easy, stable and reliable experience. After they realized that Linux can work for just about anything, that’s the time to start messing about and trying out the more specific distros.

Felt the same way with Ubuntu a few years ago. Then they messed up some graphics driver and I finally switched to something more my style with rolling releases and a tiling wm.

I will echo the CachyOS recommendation. I gave it a go on my laptop and I like it more than Mint. It’s similar, but a bit more streamlined and has a good few QOL improvements. I was hesitant because it’s arch, but it took considerably less setup to get where I wanted with it than Mint, especially if you’re doing any gaming, but there is more to the appeal to it over Mint than just that aspect, and it’s just smoother to use. I’m really liking it.

Also, I love the Pac Man bars.

I personally would suggest you to keep Mint for the main work and install some other distro in dual boot to test out. Some Arch derivative like CachyOS or EndeavourOS are light fast and have all the latest toys of Arch with included an easy installer and some decent software manager for beginners still not too used to the terminal. Just remember, newest stuff = less tested stuff, so keep some backup.

What are your use cases? I run a different distro on each of my machines. For example, my first linux machine is a server with Mint on it. I daily drive garuda and I bought a cheap laptop that Antix easily revived.