It does sound like you’d really enjoy the tinkering. When I switched (also to Linux Mint at the time), I spent the first few days figuring out how I could hide the window titlebars, because I realized I could set keyboard shortcuts for minimize/maximize/close.

That was kind of dumb, but no regrets. 🙃

I will give somewhat of an unusual recommendation for the distro, based on what you wrote: openSUSE with KDE

KDE is a desktop environment (basically the OS GUI), which has a ton of customization options, certainly more than the default desktop environment on Linux Mint.
KDE is probably going to be overwhelming at first, but on the other hand, hiding those window titlebars on KDE would’ve been a matter of minutes rather than days, because it’s just a built-in feature, not something I need to achieve with weird workarounds.

And openSUSE, because it works well with KDE and because it comes with a system settings GUI, called “YaST”, which covers a lot of the settings that you’d usually need to crack out the terminal for.
openSUSE isn’t as mainstream as Linux Mint, and not often recommended to newcomers. There’s certainly more guides and such for how to do things on Linux Mint. But yeah, I do think it’s a fine choice for newbies nonetheless and you do get that extra GUI.

To conclude my autistic ramblings, one more point, you could totally throw Linux on there for now and if you don’t like it, then buy the Windows license and go that route.