I think your assessment of Linux Mint with XFCE is a really good first choice. Cinnamon could be worth a try though as the UI is a bit more modern looking. I’m biased towards XFCE because it looks fine and runs extremely well on old laptops. I’ve got a laptop from 2008 running it (it’s my only computer that still has a disc drive) and it’s honestly a usable machine again.

I think XFCE Mint is a good experience. That said, depending on how W10 has been running for you, Cinnamon won’t be worse than that.

Oh yeah for sure. I think if Gnome works for people they should use it. I’m not stoked on the situation of Gnome Extensions being needed for some pretty basic customisations, adding instability to the DE though.

Gnome has the apple philosophy that the user conforms to technology, not the other way around.

It seems to hit that right balance of bleeding edge while SUSE are still testing the packages for a bit to ensure there aren’t bad updates. Fedora sounds interesting to me as well, but I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Gang. The only distro I haven’t been able to break after 6 months (well, I have, but I’ve been able to snapper rollback every time)