Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.

You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv

Yes, Mint for most people.

I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.

Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.

I tried a number of distros and settled on Omarchy because it has a coherent design and nice aesthetics, but it has some weird quirks about messing with my dotfiles on updates. It's so new I suspect this will be ironed out soon.

cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.

the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:

https://universal-blue.org/

Simple, Debian with i3-wm