Please pay very close attention to how Mint expects you to manage software. I haven't used Mint in a very long time, but they should have new user docs that cover this. This is my advice for any distro (though there are some commonalities) - noobies can save themselves a LOT of headache if they take some time to be sure they understand how that distro expects users to manage software.
My second piece of unasked for advice - Mint-specific forums will be much more useful for any support questions you have than general Linux forums during the time when you are getting your feet wet. There are a lot of things that are the same between distros, but enough differences to make distro-specific advice valuable for new folks.
And if you can't find an answer for a mint problem on a mint forum you might find an answer on an Ubuntu forum. In other words, add Linux mint to your search first and if that fails try Ubuntu instead. At least that has worked well for me over the last decade plus.
It could be, but I haven't used it in at least a decade, so I can't say. Agree though - it's good to be plugged right into the support channels for a distro. I do remember that Mint always put a huge focus on being sure that noobies knew where to get help, and were aware of how things "worked" as much as they needed to be. I hope/assume this ethos has continued.
Yeah I remember asking this sort of meandering question about how Firefox was only showing blank pages, and someone shot back with "update your system clock" and it worked!??? 🤯 After that, I was like, guys magic is real because I just met a wizard