people asking for those recommendations are newcomers to Linux and Ubuntu and Mint (especially) are both very newcomer friendly with large support communities when any questions come up
once they become more familiar with their system, they can turn to the Arch Wiki and the Gentoo Handbook as they fine-tune things
but neither Mint nor Ubuntu are going to hit you with any big surprises – unsupervised access to AUR in Arch, long compilation times in Gentoo, obscure (and semi-documented) programming language in Nix, or dealing with commands that are a little bit different in BusyBox, musl, or OpenRC systems …