Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.

Before doing anything you can try out different Linux Distros at Distrosea

The most important choice from the beginner is not even the distro, but what window manager to use, that will be your first interface and you need to be comfortable with it first.

Remember that most major distros now offer live ISOs, which means you can easily try them out before committing to an install.

Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.

I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It's still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I've been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.

Just do mint. If you don't like it, try another. I went mint and it felt comfortable and worked so I'm happy with it. Might try Debian next time for more stability and less cutting edge.

Aurora is my go-to nowadays

I found popos to also be beginner friendly, and I believe at the time it was specifically for people with nvidia cards but I'm not sure that makes a difference anymore.

Either way I liked that popos was being supported as a product by a company selling hardware, it seemed more reliable at the time.

Mint is great too, I believe both have windows style desktops you can choose, and also have app stores you can install programs through instead of using command line.

I'd recommend downloading both and then load them up but dont install them as you can test them out before going through the installation wizard.

Last thing is to make sure you know the category your OS is. You will need to web search for the more general category sometimes, for example with popos it would be Ubuntu. Popos and mint both have great documentation online though and forums and such.

Swoopin in to recommend: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/