Mint, afaik, offers a choice between Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. These are all DEs built and maintained to preserve a particular workflow based around hierarchical “start” menus, menu bars in applications, and desktop icons — the Win’95 style. This particular selection is very indicative of a preference for a particular era.

Which is fine if that’s your preference, too. However, you shouldn’t expect your experience to be significantly different from what it was when that desktop experience was fresh when you choose a product made by people with such strong preferences.

Again, Bluefin and the like update (atomically, with a rollback option) when you turn your computer off, with no interruptions or sudoing; app installs are through Gnome Software (for GUI stuff; through brew otherwise), without a need to enter passwords. You pay for that with some customizability, but it’s rock solid if it works on your hardware.

Honestly, I just wanted a decent taskbar, and assumed an opinionated DE would get in my way on that front.