On the distros: Go with mint. ubuntu has snaps which are the perfect way to scare new users away. They make everything super slow to launch and cause errors that make no sense if you don’t know how snaps work.
And worst of all, if you type “sudo apt install firefox”, hit enter and press Y, you won’t get what you asked for. You’ll get the snap version of firefox and the only way to know that is if you read and understand the output of apt.