Proud Linux Mint debutant here!

It's been a year or so, and it's so peaceful!

I have a windoze junkbox for photoshop, 3ds and some light gaming, and it's so painful to operate, everything is just so slow when it comes to the OS. Launch a soft, right click, open the explorer...

Yes

That doesn't really matter too much and is mostly personal preference.

The biggest difference is which package manager and how up to date each program in there is. Arch and OpenSuse Tumbleweed will have quite up to date packages as they're rolling release models while Mint and Ubuntu tend to be a bit slower and more stable.

I suggest going through the installation process of Arch linux at least once because it does teach you the basics of Linux but for usability you'd be better off with a distro that has a GUI installer.

Ubuntu, I wanted to go Debian but the installation wanted an ethternert connection to get that accomplished and I didn't know that/think that far ahead

Arch (well right now more precisely cachyos)

I’ve been using Linux on my homeserver (debian) and on previous laptops (arch) for almost a decade, but I only swapped my main desktop over this spring when nVidia sorted out waylaid explicit sync