Never tried Mint or xfce. Myself, I always customized Windows back in the day to give it my own touch. I like a highly customizable desktop that is functional. I couldn't say I could navigate xfce well enough to get it to run local LLM's. I tried Gnome and it reminded me a lot of Apple iOS due to lack of customization out of the box and gave me "the you can't do that because you might break our shit" feeling.