Linux Mint was the distro I chose little less than a year ago when I switched to Linux. Used it with Cinammon at first and then switched to XFCE. It's been a cool journey and I have def learned a lot.
But over time Mint has left more to be desired, most specifically, more up to date packages. Hence why I'm leaving the Debian / Ubuntu based distros to try OpenSuSE TW with Gnome.
Any advice would be appreciated
Consider OpenSuse Aeon if you want to dip into immutable systems.
I'm on immutable fedora and the experience has been great. Aeon is similar, I can recommend it any day over a traditional install
What's the upside of immutable distributions?
They are very difficult to break. Even if there is a problematic update that would normalny kill your install you can just roll back too the previous working version.
Great for systems that you need to 'simply work'.