I'm glad you've had a good go of it. I've been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn't expect it to just...not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just...not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of "well that's not a problem, it must be your machine's fault" when it's happening to multiple people?

I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I'll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she'll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it'll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.

It's customizable as hell, it's free and open-source, and it's helping my computer skills, so I'll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn't love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction... I can't imagine sticking with it.