ExtremeUnicorn

That highly depends on what you consider a “beginner distro” to be.

I don’t like the term, because to me, it implies that you have to emigrate from Mint to something else at some point, which is not the case.

It’s not a distro that is supposed to teach you how to do X on Linux systems. It’s just a solid OS with a lot of features that are easily accessible, which does make it suited for starters, yes.

I don’t think you have to or should touch the terminal at any time as a regular user and Mint allows you to not do that, as you pointed out as well.

I understood streaming as on the receiving end, e.g. watching streamed content online.

I would actually rate that as a plus.

While it’s nice to have the ability to run android apps, I don’t think many newcomers expect that.

However, it’s much more likely to find an Nvidia GPU in there somewhere, which works notoriously badly with Wayland.

Also Wayland has scaling issues with lower resolution fullscreen apps and settings.

I’d rather have those things working by default.

As someone who’s been in this for a while, go with Mint.

It’s not a “beginner distro”. You can start there, you can stay there as long as you don’t develop any super niche prerequisites. Even then, Mint can probably do it.

The developers are sane and it’s a popular system that has been in development for years with many tweaks and improvements. There’s a big community around it if you need help/guides.

You just can’t go wrong with it.