I’d say avoid Wayland for now. There’s no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.
Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn’t have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it’s easy to remove them if you don’t and use the app you want. If it’s a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn’t recommend using alot of those as you’ll be pressed for disk space
Linux doesn’t require maintenance. It typically just works. It’s not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don’t work about it.
What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don’t like canonical.
It’s been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.