Jimmy,

The neat thing is that today, it's easy peasy to test most Linux distributions as they will have a live disk for testing.

Mint is one of the few distributions I will not use for personal reasons and for the fact that they appear to have gone off the rails by going against the tide, They will end up having to recompile just about every single app in their repo to be compatible with their chosen structure. Sure, it works great now... but when the going gets tough, do they have enough people to keep things up to date?

Honestly, I'd take Ubuntu-Mate for a spin if I were you, very nicely done and super easy to configure! It even has a nice welcome app that helps you install all the basic stuff most users want. I'll admit, my needs are a bit more esoteric... and I got tired of having to compile things. If I run a Ubuntu based machine, I can always use the PPA or .DEB file instead. This may all be a moot point in the near future with containerization coming shortly. Snap packages are a breeze to install, though you still have to reach for the command line. In Ubuntu-Mate, all I do is hit the F12 key and a terminal drops from the top of the monitor.

Other nice distros are Elementary, Solus and if you really want the Bleeding Edge feel of Arch without the headaches.... Antergos. Antergos IS Arch, but all the work has been done and you can simply install the desktop of your choice when you tell it to install, I think you get a choice of at least 5 or more. The live disk defaults to Gnome 3, but during the install you are asked which you want. I've used KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 3, Mate, XFCE and several more and as I mentioned, I like Mate... it's light and fast, has a lot of familiarity with Gnome 2 and development is well organized and up to date... bug fixes get done quickly.

About once a year, I'll fire up my DVD burner and grab a rewritable disk and work my way through the new releases, to see if there's something I like better than what I have. The main thing to remember, while the software may be free, as in beer, throw a few nickels at your distribution of choice. Running those servers that distribute the software have real costs tied to them.

I'm going to assume you are aware of Distrowatch, if not, surf over there and you'll find news of the latest releases.

If you think Slack is hard..... stay far away from LinuxFromScratch and Gentoo! :-)

It's all good really, no need to slave away at the command line if you don't want to, that's really for the nerds who need to do weird stuff.... and or when something needs fixing.

The command line can be very powerful, and it's handy to have access to, but for day to day, I never see a command prompt on my desktops... my Raspberry Pi, Odroid C2.... sure... why waste cpu cycles on gui's if you don't have any spare CPU cycles to waste. I have a Pi 2 downstairs running Dietpi/Pi-hole/Hotspot that works great, and a Banana Pro with Xubuntu running rsync tasks upstairs (backing up my backup, in case the basement floods). I have another Pi running as a media server on my TV and two more just sitting here on the desk, looking for something useful to do.

Regards

Christian