I guess it is time to make the jump to Mint Cinnamon. I have been dabbling with Linux for well over a decade but it has always been secondary to Windows (for multiple reasons).
But now I am basically retired and don't need to concern myself with interacting with "the office" any more. My current Windows is 10 version 21H1 and so I have probably gotten pretty close to 11 already. But I ignore Edge and other "cloud" stuff as much as possible, and keep all my data on local drives.
I like Mint Cinnamon very well (after a few years of straight Ubuntu), and there used to be LTS versions every couple of years - so that was approximately my update interval. Do you recommend climbing the update ladder relatively more often or less often?
Mint is great for learning but the upgrade path SUCKS.
Seriously, I don't understand how they can make such a great distro but flub the update process so badly. They recently started pushing automatic updates because people were not updating, we stopped updating because they screwed them up so bad. I tried upgrading from 18 to 19 and 19 to 20 on 4 different systems, 2 were fresh installs and it failed on every one of them. Cinnamon and to a lesser degree Gnome also has issues with dual screens
While I think Mint is a great start I'd recommend one of 3 distros once you have the hang of it...
Ubuntu - Ignore the hate, it's a good distro for new and old users, gaming however is bad.
Pop! - Great distro, great desktop tweaks, MUCH better than Ubuntu if you game yet retains Ubuntu compatibility.
Manjaro - Arch based, which means you can use the AUR which gives it more available software than Ubuntu PPAs. It's a bit more raw, but that's not always a bad thing.
Ubuntu and Pop! handle upgrades/updates better than Mint, which like I said is TERRIBLE. Manjaro you never do a distro update, it just rolls along constantly evolving, this is why I ended up in the Arch branch after Mint flubbed so bad. It never goes out of date. You don't need to worry about support ending or this or that not being supported by your version, it's all one version, it just updates as it goes along. It's not without an occasional hiccup and the closer you get to pure Arch the more problems it brings but Manjaro deals with it pretty well and it's rare anything goes really wrong.
Ubuntu holds back GPU and WINE updates (A LOT) and makes it a chore to install newer versions plus 32bit support, it's so bad people think they do it on purpose to dissuade you from doing it, making gaming a hassle on it. Pop! on the other hand embraces it, same with Manjaro, but it's not consistent with what they work with, one will do X game better than Y and the other will do Y better than X. Both however seem to be the choice for gamers when you look at the Proton database.
Me, I'd go with Manjaro but I can totally get the love for Pop! If you like tinkering with your OS a little to get more out of it, go with Manjaro (still less tweaking than with Windows), if you just want to click a few buttons and not mess with it, go with Pop! In either case, getting something working can sometimes be a bit of a hassle but once you do the OS tends to fade away into the background, AS IT SHOULD. That was something I was kind of surprised with Windows lately, something is ALWAYS vying for your attention, either a program wanting permissions, wanting to be default or wanting an update. It's constant. Mac has gone a similar route but to nowhere near the degree Windows does. For as much hands off as they are supposed to be they sure do need a lot of hand holding.