Linux Mint was the distro I chose little less than a year ago when I switched to Linux. Used it with Cinammon at first and then switched to XFCE. It’s been a cool journey and I have def learned a lot.
But over time Mint has left more to be desired, most specifically, more up to date packages. Hence why I’m leaving the Debian / Ubuntu based distros to try OpenSuSE TW with Gnome.
Any advice would be appreciated
My only issue is software availability and management. I use the Packman repository to manage codecs and I avoid using the change vendor option; i used to change the vendor every time and ended up with a broken system, so I reinstalled and also resized my partition because I dual boot. I haven’t had problems at all.
You only need to pay attention for your needs, I recently installed systemd networking packages because they don’t come preinstalled, and YaST is very helpful in some situations like installing patterns (multiple related packages at once), mostly desktop environments. I gotta say that the openSUSE Wiki may not be enough to understand, but there is an official forum and you can also look at the Arch wiki.
Btw, GNOME is the official DE used by the developers, but KDE Plasma works very well, and all of them update constantly, you’ll have available updates every week.