I toyed with Ubuntu for the first couple weeks before switching to Mint, and I’ve now been a happy Mint user for several months with no big hiccups. I’m a little bolder and wiser now, though, and I feel like I can still get more out of Linux by jumping to a more unstable and tweakable distro.
Stick with mint.
This is exactly why I hate it when people describe some distros as “beginner friendly”. Because they’re also “expert friendly”. There isn’t anything you can’t do with Mint that you could do with another distro.