Mint is always a good starting point.
Don't use plain ubuntu, it uses snaps for a lot of stuff and it breaks many little things. Mint is based on ubuntu, but without involuntary snaps.
You should take a look at the available desktop environments: Cinnamom, XFCE and Mate for limux mint. Pick the one that looks nicest to you or cinnamon if you can't decide.
Also check out gnome and KDE, those don't come with mint but starting on a different distro isn't a problem.
Anyways, the distro doesn't matter too much. The differences apart from desktop environments (and snaps) are tiny.