It’s one of those things where it depends on the computer. My old box that’s running win 7 has nothing but music and backed up media files on it, isn’t connected to the internet at all, and there’s really no point to it being encrypted.
My laptop leaves the house, and is connected, so it gets the treatment. My general purpose PC is, though that was more just because of a random choice rather than a carefully chosen decision. I figured I’d try it for a few weeks, then nuke it if it was a problem. It hasn’t been, and I haven’t needed to do anything to it that would require a change.
The other people in the house have chosen not to.
I’m not certain I would encrypt my main desktop again, just because it’s one more thing to do, and I’m getting lazy lol. I don’t have any sensitive files at all, and if things in the world get so bad that some agency is after me, I’m going to be hiding out up in this holler I know, not worrying about leaving a computer behind. Won’t be power anyway, and the only shit they’d find is some pirated files.
I’d be more worried about my phone and my main tablet than any of the PCs, and those would either go with me, or get melted down before I left. Thermite is cheap and easy.
Imo, the great thing about mint is stability first. You can tinker with it, but it’s generally about being able to plug it in, and get started using your device with as little puttering around as possible. It tends to be one of, if not the, most out of the box easy to install on any hardware.
Yes, it lags a little behind since it’s a derivative distro, and they tend to keep packages stable over recent. If you need more recent packages, it can suck since you’ll have more work to do to get it set up. But the average user doesn’t really need need bleeding edge stuff.
Then you’ve got their flagship DE, cinnamon. Again, right from install, it’s usable, visually easy, and pretty much bug free. But it still has enough depth of features to play with if you want.
When I started exploring Linux as win10 started being more and more obviously something I wasn’t going to like, I tried a bunch of distros on multiple machines. Mint ended up being the most reliable on all of them. By the time I was picking up enough background to be able to move to something else and make it work, mint was still doing what I needed, so I only play around with distros when I’m gifted old hardware and patch something together out of it. And I end up going to mint on those because there’s really nothing better for my needs, and I like it.