Ubuntu is fine, people’s objection to it is largely ideological. For a band new user you probably wouldn’t notice. Ubuntu also has a more modern desktop than Mint, and a much larger user-base and therefore much more guides and support, though Mint is based on Ubuntu so it’s probably not that different.
The big thing with Ubuntu is that you are sort of at the behest of whatever Canonical want. They have a track record of pushing their own way of doing things and not really giving a damn whether or not users like it. The big one is Snap, their attempt at a universal app packaging pipeline which uses a proprietary backend. Snap does have some benefits over flatpak from an engineering standpoint, but many dislike them. If you feel ideologically opposed to Snap, just use Debian, it’s easy enough to install these days. It is also worth noting that Snap can be removed from a fresh install pretty easily.
This is an objectively false statement. There are at least one scenario I can think of where Snap is better than flatpak.