Preface.
It's fine. Stop being such a big baby and install Linux already. I'm doing this on fresh hardware that's kind of jank and it's still fine.
Installing.
You have to download an ISO, some magic program that makes bootable USB drives, and apply them to a USB stick. This is the hardest part of the process.
Then you plug that in and restart the computer. Now you're in Linux and can poke around to see if you're okay with this (and should; there's like a 20% chance something important like your network card doesn't work with Linux, in which case you should bail or try a different distro). An icon on the desktop offers to actually install it. It's easier than signing up for some websites.
All of the above is true of most Linux distros, particularly the ones people recommend to beginners.
One of the initial install options was to set my theme as light/dark with various colored accents. That was probably Mint-specific. It was very cute.
Problems.
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I have a high-DPI screen. Mint defaulted to giving everything 2x scaling, which was pretty cluttered. 1x was tiny. 1.5x is blurry. I went with 1x but changed the size of all the menu fonts to be a bit bigger. This was kind of fiddly and unnecessary and took me five minutes.
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The default scroll rate for the trackpad was way too high. There's no slider to adjust it because the maintainer of that package thinks there's some objective answer to how much a trackpad should scroll, that we're not enlightened enough to see. I had to use an obscure program to lie to my computer and tell it my track pad is half as big. This took like an hour, kind of grumpy this is a problem. I guess I could've just let it scroll too fast.
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You can install Steam and set some setting that magically makes every game work on Linux, but it's hidden in a weird menu.
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The default text editor is xed, and I feel obligated to use it for a while and see why they thought it was good enough to make the default, but it's not as good as gedit, or other good editor. This is self-inflicted and I could fix it in about two minutes.
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Linux power/heat management is a little over-eager about turning the fan on whole blast, especially when streaming videos.
Touchpad handling and DPI scaling have always worked fine in KDE for me. The touchpad configurator that ships with the full package blows Microsoft’s out of the water.
Since everyone here seems to agree that Ubuntu is the correct starter OS, I’d pitch Kubuntu as a great alternate to Mint.
I tried kde plasma on a different distro, liked the WM and switched over to a clean kubuntu install, definitely a great WM. It's only a tiny bit slower than XFCE on an old laptop, too, so now it's my go-to for older hardware.