Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.

That doesn't mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.

Most of distros use the same projects code-wise, some just add some patches or lag months behind. I mean, it doesn't really matter, just do it. You'll either be happy with anything or outgrow whatever you pick up now. And either sooner or later land using one that you will decide is absolutely the best, or just have vague preferences in the end
But it's the journey that does it, not a particular distro

Of those two, I think Fedora is the better choice since the packages are more up to date. Fedora with Plasma is a great choice anyway. It's also a large distro with lots of online support. Try it out!

You're going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.

Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can't go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn't go for it.

Fredora is also top tier and again you can't go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).

When you're wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.

I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn't get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something "beginner friendly" unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.

If you are going to game daily, I would recommend Nobara. Which is based on Fedora, but has all the gaming stuff precompiled/installed and ready to go from the start, Which makes getting started with gaming much easier. Its very user friendly to boot.

but if you just want an binary answer between Mint or Fedora, I'd say Fedora.. since you will still be able to find, install, and benefit from a lot of the Nobara stuff, even if its not included in the box from the start.