Linux Mint has been my preferred distro for years. I used to do a lot of distro hopping but always came back to Mint.
People sometimes say Ubuntu is debian done properly, and then then mint is ubuntu done properly
you can make it as simple or as complicated to use as you want.
Many Mint users would use the in built software manager to download and install software same way as you do on a phone
I use OpenOffice or or LibreOffice at home, works fine for word style docs or spreadsheets. Perhaps super Excel power users may miss some functionality but I've never thought "I wish it did that thing Office did", and perhaps more importantly, I can't remember the last time I had a problem with a file I've used in MS Office, and then used in LibreOffice and vice versa.
my missus isn't IT literate and she's used Mint with no problem, doesn't care it's not windows, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome all work the same. wouldn't know how to use the command line, but hasn't needed to.
I think the only thing that would stop most people is the ability to play modern PC games. Some older games work in steam, or with wine, but not the latest.
wine is pretty good for using certain windows programs where you can't find a Linux equivalent in many, but not all cases.
but as suggested about, try it, using some software to create your usb image you can make the image "remember" your downloads, settings etc, rather than it being fresh like when you boot of a cd each time.
other alterbative is use virtualbox and create a virtual machine, then if you like it install, or reszie your hard drive and do a dual boot until you feel comfortable to make te switch.
that's what i did many years ago, XP on 1 partition, Ubuntu on another openSUSE on another, would try different distros on the 2 Linux partitions until I settled on Mint, and XP got used purely for games and nothing else, was a few years ago
since then don't game on pc, so Mint is fine.
have a look at distrowatch.com read about different ones.
a lot of people will swear by one of another, i'd say Mint is great, for newbies it's easy to use, get used to, but if you want to be a power user, there's nothing to stop you opening an xterm and getting dirty