Linux Mint has been nothing but solid and consistent since I started to use it.

Have you seen elementary OS? Very clearly macOS inspired and they've done a great job with it. Worth a look for anyone who hates half-assed and inconsistent UIs.

I'm not a regular user (just toyed with it in some VMs) so I can't vouch for how the updates do, but I was impressed with the overall level of polish. It's an Ubuntu-derivative based on LTS releases so it lags a ways behind the cutting edge.

EDIT: looks like elementary OS 5.0 "Juno" is in beta and should be out soon. This release is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Elementary is good in terms of looks on the face, but starts to break down as soon as you dig deeper. Inconsistent updates and strange issues requiring manual intervention via the terminal are still there.

I do remember some UI inconsistency showing up as soon as you want any software that wasn't written specifically for elementary (like VS Code), but that's inevitable since it's basically rolling its own UI no matter what OS you're on.

Not recalling much repeated terminal intervention, though there were a few safety nets that I immediately turned off the moment I had it installed (I think related to package manager installations?)

Dropbox did not work well.

> The thing is, Windows 10 is starting to look more and more like a Linux distribution. Half-assed and inconsistent UI, broken updates, etc.

Desktop engineering is hard (as Microsoft are demonstrating). There are a very small number of really good desktop distributions (Fedora, Solus, Ubuntu Mate, may be a couple of others), which are not inconsistent or half-assed, but the side-effect of Free Software is that any motivated developer can have a go and put out their own distribution.