I'm personally not a fan of Mint - tried it for a month or so. My impression is that if it works with your muscle memory, it works well. If not... then even Windows ends up more user-friendly.
I'm particularly not a fan of the "start menu" because you don't really get a lot of space for pinned apps, and there's no way to really modify that. I ended up liking KDE quite a lot more. It takes a bit longer to set it up to what you like, but its customization means that while there's a bigger upfront cost to setup, it's much smoother once it is set up.
I'm using KDE Neon (Ubuntu + KDE), which I'm pretty happy with. But I'm also debating whether to switch to Kubuntu (also Ubuntu + KDE for some reason)