I can’t disagree with mint being a good distribution, because it is.

I personally think for someone just starting out in Linux that an immutable distribution like fedora silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde) is the safest route to take. They’re difficult to break. I personally use bazzite on my framework laptop and it’s basically hassle free. Not for everyone, but they work well.

I’ve been using proton for a couple years now. I trust and like the services they provide. Plus they regularly perform third party audits and make the results public. https://protonvpn.com/blog/no-logs-audit