I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.
Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.
It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It’s designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.
FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.
If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn’t have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.
As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it’s just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don’t really think about it much anymore.
Don’t feel bad about the distro you land on, especially not Linux Mint. It’s the #1 distro I recommend to completely new Linux users.
I use it myself for any computer that I want a #JustWorks experience on. The Cinnamon desktop environment is super stable and easy to use. And so far, Linux Mint is the only distro I know of where you truly don’t have to use the terminal for anything even kernel updates/rollbacks, alternative driver installations, and major version upgrades.
The Mint team is wonderful and they’ve created a fantastic product.