Mint’s ok other than that ubun taint Years ago it was a one man show, not as much now?
I came & went from Mint 2010, I don’t remember specifics, something about network shares

My criteria is corporate or community?
Tinker or work?
Bleeding edge or just works
KDE/qt or Gnome/gtk, there are a few DE’s forked from Gnome
I like the consistency across KDE apps of being able to have a custom toolbar & shortcuts

I like community built, user friendly, KDE

Whatever you choose, install the meta package. You can add a DE, but you will have to chase weird crap & it will never be as good as a clean install
I like to install whatever I want to test on usb3 external nvme/sdd/hdd & use the Home [files] on the main machine or copy home as backup, best way to get the full effect of any distro
Just to be safe I like to have stuff from different parts of the linux world as backups

Debian MX just works, been good since they got over their init fixation, got all sorts of user friendly stuff, 6 month release cycle, enough community to keep it working
I just downloaded Spiral linux all the nice touches, but updates direct from debian, kind of like the various arch installers, but not quite so do it yourself
I don’t really like synaptic, the text is too small, takes too long

Arch
Manjaro
As much arch as you want
Very user friendly, big community, Pamac [best package manager], rolling release

Red hat Suze is having weirdness from corporate again
I’m on Mageia, a long history of user friendly [drak tools], stable, just works
Very good community, 18 month release cycle, nice online version upgrade, rpm packages

The highest aspiration for capitalism is to have “passive income” to be a gatekeeper, find some little loop hole to exploit, socialize the costs & privatize the profits

Copyright imbues the creation with a level of uniqueness that is greatly exaggerated
Given a set of facts & tools people will come to similar or identical conclusions
So What?
Should that entitle you to be a gatekeeper forever?

Humans have an urge for legacy. Legacy is probably the most destructive of human traits, it manifest as hoarding a bunch of resources, having as many children as possible, being noticed, being “famous”. The last two are having your legacy NOW

Legacy is self preservation exaggerated to extremes