Oh is this an excuse to hop on the Mint praise train? Don’t mind if I do!
For me it was smoother than windows to install, it runs much better moment to moment (it’s like the people that made it were worried about making nice software rather than the business goals being pushed by their managers), and most importantly the fact that it is the “beginner” distro doesn’t compromise its capabilities. I am in the terminal all day every day and I use the machine to work on software for embedded Linux systems.
Mint was so easy to install. I'm pretty new to Linux. Not afraid of having to do things in the terminal, but I don't really know many commands yet. So, I appreciate the graphical managers for updates and drivers. You can definitely tell they really worked to make a polished OS. And I really like Cinnamon. It's a very clean looking DE that has been super easy to transition to from Windows.
Unlike Kubuntu, I didn't have to do any tricks or install anything from github to get stuff from my Steam library to work, everything just worked. And Kubuntu (or perhaps just Wayland) would crash upon waking my PC from sleep and wouldn't recover.