It heavily depends on your needs, wants, and expectations.

In simplest terms, Ubuntu is Mac-like and Mint is Windows-like. At least, on the surface. Basically everything else is feature parity, just requires slightly different arrangements depending on which flavor you’re running.

I didn’t much like Ubuntu as it feels too close to MacOS to me. Primarily because I don’t really like that aesthetic. Ubuntu and Mint were my first forays into Linux as well, but this was also years ago when Mint was relatively new to the scene. While I personally liked the style of Mint, at the time it just didn’t have nearly enough features for what I was into.

These days I settled on CachyOS which is a fork of Arch. Cachy is aimed at gaming, but comes with a very straightforward installer with a huge amount of customization options to really make the OS your own. That’s ultimately what keeps me on Arch is the genuine ease of customization at this point. Rolling releases don’t bother me as i used to do CyanogenMod nightlies and this is like the big boy version of that, but I also can fully appreciate wanting shit to just work.

That said, Ubuntu is arguably the most popular distro because of its similarities to Mac and the “It just works” vibes it tends to give off these days.

The best part of Linux is how easy it is to check out a new flavor and see how you like it. And once you do find the flavor that suits you, the mega nerds in that particular community have probably already figured out how to do that thing you want. And if those folks didn’t for any reason, the folks at AUR* probably did.

*AUR = Arch User Repository and is an unregulated repository of whatever anyone clever enough to develop for Arch has come up with. Peruse and download at your own risk, but there’s some genuinely awesome and useful tools out there.