I’m almost just as green as you, so if anyone else comments here you should probably follow their advice over mine, but the only distro I’ve tried with no monitor/Nvidia driver headaches has been Kubuntu. the kde desktop is still very familiar to windows by default and so far everything just works for me, might be worth a shot if you can’t get it figured out with mint.
edit: just thought of another advice
try switching from Wayland to x11, or vice versa. I’ve heard they can cause wonky things like this