Your experience from Ubuntu might have a lot to do with it since, not only is flatpak not enabled by default on Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, but Ubuntu specifically also uses GNOME which is an interface that is quite far removed from Windows.
...that being said, Mint is based on Ubuntu and has none of those issues. Honestly for the last 5+ years, Ubuntu isn't really seen as the default go-to anymore and I generally find it instead being split between Mint Cinnamon (beginners), Manjaro KDE Plasma (native PC gaming), and Fedora Workstation (software-dev & productivity), with special mention to elementary OS for Mac lovers.
(a year or two ago Pop_OS! was also a common go-to choice for native PC gaming, but Valve's choice of Arch for SteamOS 3.0 and their subsequent recommendation to use Manjaro as the closest analog has shifted things)
...that being said, Mint is based on Ubuntu and has none of those issues. Honestly for the last 5+ years, Ubuntu isn't really seen as the default go-to anymore and I generally find it instead being split between Mint Cinnamon (beginners), Manjaro KDE Plasma (native PC gaming), and Fedora Workstation (software-dev & productivity), with special mention to elementary OS for Mac lovers.
(a year or two ago Pop_OS! was also a common go-to choice for native PC gaming, but Valve's choice of Arch for SteamOS 3.0 and their subsequent recommendation to use Manjaro as the closest analog has shifted things)
Dolphin 5.0 CPU benchmark
CPU: Xeon E3-1246 v3 (4c/8t Haswell/Intel 4th gen) — core & cache @ 3.9GHz via multicore enhancement
GPU: Intel integrated HD Graphics P4600
RAM: 4x8GB Corsair Vengence @ DDR3-1600
OS: Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce + [VM] Win7 SP1 x64
CPU: Xeon E3-1246 v3 (4c/8t Haswell/Intel 4th gen) — core & cache @ 3.9GHz via multicore enhancement
GPU: Intel integrated HD Graphics P4600
RAM: 4x8GB Corsair Vengence @ DDR3-1600
OS: Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce + [VM] Win7 SP1 x64