I have Mint on a very old MacBook. It is definitely more akin to Windows. I went went Pop on my desktop due to the baked in Nvidia drivers. Of the 2, I prefer Pop by a long mile. To my eye, Pop is just more modern design wise and simpler to use
I’ve been running Pop_OS as the only OS for my desktop for several months. I really like it. Other than a couple adjustments on where to find things, it really was a smooth transmission. You can change the placement of a lot of elements in the settings, so be sure to poke around there to make it more like you are used to. I use mostly Steam/Proton, and it has not failed me yet. The only thing I use Lutris for is Satisfactory on Epic Games, but that also runs great.