Sorry for the delay. It's been a crazy couple of days.

Any operating system will have some kind of learning curve, but I agree that Linux in general requires a bit more time and...lots of tinkering. Heck, even Windows, as you mentioned, has its quirks that need to be figured out.

While Ubuntu is generally a good starting point, there are some oddities (like files being left behind). You'll still run into some of these with Mint, but hopefully you've found it a smoother experience overall.

If you're still willing to toy around with at least one other distribution, I'd recommend Zorin OS as being relatively user-friendly. If you do end up trying it, I'd be interested to hear your feedback: