Mad and linux-ish suggestion: if you are very very very used to vim keybindings you can try qutebrowser, bit that's more a side-broswer than a daily driver.

Jokes aside, Mint is really good. My suggestion is to try to not to be dispersive with regards to the installation methods for the software you install, meaning that going with flatpak+.deb+snap+.AppImage+source ecc can make the update of dependencies and software very cumbersome. Instead, try to centralize into a few methods...for ideological reasons I would not recommend Snap, go for flatpak.

I don't know how the "windows emulator" market is for Apple products, for GNU/Linux you have mainly Wine. But overall Wine is not very good, try to avoid emulation if possibile. If you're using Gnome as a DE I suggest to proritize the utilities that Gnome bundles in its suite...they're very nice and well done.