I used to have bunch of key maps, now it’s just: tap it to pull up the start menu and type software I want to open, and meta + space to change language input on my keyboard.

I guess pretty much it.

There are many music players, none of them is extremely good. I like Sayonara.

I remember using mint at some point. That was indeed a long time ago. Didn’t know about the problems.

Not really sure why you want to switch from mint. Mint is a nice distribution to test out Linux because it comes with many things readily installed and with decent defaults. Since you’re worried about compatibility with several peripherals I’d stick with that.

If you want to switch to something else to learn something new, then pretty much any other distribution is fine. Given enough customisation every distribution is just the same as any other. The only real difference is the repository updates schedule.