Transitioning from Windows to Linux Mint was effortless for me, everything worked out of the box and i haven't typed a line of code yet. All i've had to to do is install Diodon to get the clipboard history feature.
However all i've done with it is internet and office work, basic stuff. No gaming, no video editing, no 3D animation or any such. I think if you have a mature and complicated creative workflow it's totally possible that you'll struggle to move to Linux
Mostly web surf, listen to music, take notes, do file organization, etc. I have my Steam Deck for gaming, and I'd probably use web-based apps for the engineering work I do before loading anything onto my laptop
But I may also want to download things like FreeCAD and other tools in the future
Any linux OS with a Desktop Environment will do that for you. If it's a newer laptop you should probably go with Fedora and pick KDE Plasma desktop. Fedora has really good driver support for newer hardware and seems to work well with what framework laptops ship with.
Linux Mint is also good however try to stay away from snaps starting out as they can cause confusing behavior due to how they're implemented. A recent problem was Firefox from the snap store not working over VNC.
I still use Mint. Even though I'm having problems lately with mounting external drives. I mained Elementary OS for a while but something about it seemed....shallow.
External SSD in an enclosure.
So, it says it has a bad sector or bad generic error. I'll put it on my wife's windows laptop and do a chkdmsk /f/v/r and it cleans nothing up. And then it'll work one time in my Linux mint. When I use it on my windows 10 living room machine then back to the mint computer - same error.
As long as I don't put it into a windows computer Linux mint is happy
Oooo I'll try that when I get out of this parking lot. And yea /dev/sda1. Also yes NTFS, 2tb with too much shit to swap around to use a different format.