Another Mint + Thinkpad vote here. I'm a lifelong Windows user who has occasionally dabbled in Linux, and Mint is the first distro that I've stuck with enough to consider it my daily driver. I have it running on a used Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 with an AMD Ryzen 7 in it. I still have a separate Windows desktop for gaming and Adobe Lightroom, but the Thinkpad is my everyday couch PC now. Everything worked out of the box except for the infrared camera used for face unlock type stuff, and the fingerprint reader. I got the camera set up to use the Linux equivalent of Windows Hello, Howdy, and while it does work now it's not as fast and reliable as it was under Windows. I haven't even tried to set up the fingerprint reader yet. I'm very happy with how well everything works in general under Linux Mint.

I'll also add: There's a base distribution and then a variety of "Window Managers" (WM) or "Desktop Environments" (DE) to choose from. These determine the layout of your desktop, "control panel" analog, what settings can be tweaked, and stuff like the network/volume controls accessible him the tray etc.

Mate/Cinnamon are good, but I recommend KDE/Plasma Desktop. I've had good luck with that one for people who I've helped migrate from Windows.

Your can actually install multiple DE's and will be able to choose which one you use at the graphical login screen.

As for Chrome, I think Google still has a repository for that or one can use Chromium which is the base experience for that anyhow.

For code editors, there's a bunch of choices. I tend to use Pluma for basic text stuff, Bluefish for a lot of web stuff, and CodeBlocks for C++'ish stuff. You can also install VSCode on Linux if you so desire and a lot of people seem to quite like it.

Hardware I lean more towards **AMD - though not bleeding edge - as the drivers come with the OS kernel and tend to get updated with such. I've generally not had issues since about the RX480 days, except for some weirdness with APU's not liking certain TVs (usually scaling issues). Nvidia generally works too, but requires a proprietary driver stub be installed for accelerated graphics and that can sometimes break on updates. Most Intel (graphics) is ok, but there have been a few issues with less-common chips in smaller fiorm-factor or tablety devices.

** I have heard people complain about some AMD stuff, but honestly I've run an RX480, Vega56, 6900XT, and 3-4 generations of APU's without major issues except when those chips were fairly new (first 6mo of release can be dicey).