I too think Cinnamon is a pretty great Experience. I am using KDE and heard from many people that it feels better, its more unified and has way more features.
Wayland is important for security, and Mint will need a long time to adopt that. There are already apps only running on Wayland for reasons.
KDE is a bit unstable as its a huge project. I hope that will get better in Plasma 6.
I sure wish to have something like KDE more stable. But once you are used to it, its just better. Things that are not there yet on Mint are on KDE since years.
Its a bit of a mess as its so old. Extensions need to be cleaned up. But like, Dolphin extensions are so great, I dont know an equivalent on Cinnamon.
Also the distro model is the standard one. A Fedora Atomic Cinnamon variant, with modern presets and everything working, would be a great thing to install anywhere. Automatic atomic updates, easy version upgrades, transparent system changes and resets being just one command away.
I started on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Native apps where often horrible. I remember SciDavis for Ubuntu being completely broken, Libreoffice for Fedora, and Flatpak just worked.
Officially supported Flatpaks are great, a bit like the Windows way but better, as they are reviewed, containerized and in an actual repository.
But flatpakking random apps isnt that easy, but I really want to learn it. Especially an easy semi-automatic way of converting Appimages (may they burn in hell) to Flatpaks. Like BalenaEtcher and so many more.
Also, Flatpaks are not secure in the case of biig projects. Nearly all the known Linux apps like Libreoffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc are unisolated. And trying to specify the permissions (only home and all the mounts, instead of your entire root partition) gives you “they are insecure anyways and should get portals” and your PRs closed.
So they are in a very incomplete state currently, and you need to manually secure them to be actually kinda protected. But without Portals, entire home access is not actually isolated.
Problem here is that many apps like VLC, that work great, are not yet adopted by upstream, so the verified repo is not really usable currently.
And native messaging (keepassxc-browser, etc.) and other things are not always working. Drag&drop is, for some reason, but not in Firefox, maybe there are different ways.
In general its not about the CPU or GPU. Even Nvidia works kinda okay on some Devices, at least according to Nick from TheLinuxExperiment. Some apps like Davinciresolve require it, and cuda is also only supported on Nvidia. Mobile AMD graphics are kinda underpowered for some tasks.
Its more about weird hardware that isnt supported, Fingerprint readers, even keyboards going into some weird hibernation and you need to hard reset the PC as you cant control it anymore (Acer swift). Some devices like Microsoft Surfaces need a custom kernel.
Lots ot refurbished business laptops like the Lenovo T series, HP or Dell business series works well, as they also dont have weird components.
Check linux-hardware.org and if you have a running laptop, install their HWprobe and run it, to share that your laptop is working. With comments you can add what is really working etc.
Personally I would also care about Coreboot. Checkout Novacuston (EU) or System76 or Starlabs, they have Coreboot laptops. I mean, installing Linux on some laptop with a proprietary garbage Bios that doesnt get updates (!!!) anymore is pretty hypocritical. Coreboot is awesome but rare, its awesome that there are some companies and people making it run on new hardware, so I would check those out.
Intel integrated graphics and CPU are better imho. I have no GUI way of controlling energy saver on AMD while thats there in intel. Like changing the governor and all. Thats not even remotely there on AMD, there are apps but not on Fedora at least yet.
Mint has very nice tooling but its a weird Ubuntu derivate. One day a specific software doesnt install, or you have an XOrg problem that will never be fixed, or standard updates simply break something, and then…
Mint is nice and easy to get going, but its outdated a lot, and uses a Distro model that I dont like to install on random laptops that are never updated.
Flatpaks are all containerized, its really nice. All in the same directory, glad that it worked! You can do the same for the Flatpak user data directories in ~/.var/app/.
Run the Flatpak app once, close it again, then the user data file structure will be there. If you delete the files you simply reset the app, its like Android, awesome.
And if you simply delete all the files and swap in your old files, it will be the same Flatpak app as on the old device.