You’re welcome! I’m definitely no expert with Linux as I only truly started digging in several weeks ago. I’ve got a MacBook Pro for anything I can’t do on Linux and, like I said above, I’ve been hopping around/making mistakes/reinstalling in a frenzy since then.
To answer your question with my limited experience, Mint is just a good gateway for Windows folks wanting to switch to Linux. I used it for a bit a year or so ago, but there were issues with the nvidia drivers at the time, so I didn’t stick to it. Now, however, those have been updated and it is the easiest so far (aside from maybe Pop! OS) to get Linux playing nice with nvidia cards. I was easily able to get my Steam games as well as Diablo IV on Lutris (a sort of translation layer frontend to allow battle.net to run) going. Debian is only slightly less simple, and it took me a bit to find a site that made it easier (the link in my post above) for me.
I’m at the point now where I can get just about any distro I’ve hopped to/from up and running pretty quickly with my 2080Ti. OpenSUSE is the only one that I just simply couldn’t get everything working right. It has a completely different way of installing apps and utilities than the others I’ve tried. It’s a "cutting edge, " rolling distro, which means it updates things as soon as they’re stable, unlike most others. So, it might have something to do with that aspect. All in all, Debian has been a good, solid distro that I’ve been happy with. I haven’t tried LMDE, so I can’t speak to it directly but, and others more experienced than me can please chime in, I think it’s mostly Debian with the Cinnamon desktop environment. That may be simplistic, but that’s my current understanding.
Sorry for the long post. Hope it helps.
That’s my fear as well. Google breaks literally everything they touch.