Their interface is familiar to Windows users but so is KDE and many things that aren’t GNOME. Primarily it is the flagship distro for Cinnamon, they put a lot of work into making the user experience seamless and their implementation of Cinnamon especially is much better than other distros that ship it as an option. They also co-founded MATE when GNOME 3 came out and have supported that forever.

Main thing for me is extremely sane defaults, just enough automation to simplify some things without it getting in the way, just enough customization without it being overwhelming or an eyesore (I hate KDE context menus). It’s been very good for getting out of the way so I can focus, I appreciate that it doesn’t have a ton of flying, shiny objects all over the place but still looks good, and I don’t have to add a ton of extensions to get it the way I like.

It’s just a generally solid, stable, and easy to use distro. I use EndeavourOS nowadays, but when I was first getting started Mint was what I always returned to after spats of distro hopping. As far as it’s primary DE, Cinnamon, it’s less “windows like” and more “not gnome like”. Every DE that isn’t gnome could be called “windows like” in my experience.