>I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well

I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.

They were one of the few distros at the time which had a sane out-of-the-box desktop experience for non-tech people, back when Ubuntu was pushing (the original) Unity and GNOME was still the the early days of 3.x. Drivers and codecs were easy to install as well, generally speaking, without having to hit the forums or ask your tech family member for help.