I eval'd popOS and mint and went with pop due to the fancy gnome tiling plugin. It's been a pleasant experience, but the software updater uses like 1G of ram on an 8GB laptop and I'm beginning to wish I was running mint xfce.

Mint is actually great. I used to dismiss it because it seemed slow with its technical choices, but the flip side of that is that the experience is really refined. The support is great and it's very well suited for beginners and especially people who prefer GUI tools over the command line.

I love Mint! I am a refugee. When I read about the requirement to have a Microsoft account I motivated to learn and finally make the switch. Mint does have its issues with modules, and package availability, but I am slowly learning its quirks.