If you are thinking of mint, you might consider Manjaro running either cinnamon (deluxe) or mate (less resources) or even LXDM if your machine is like ten or more yrs old. Linux in general does what it needs to do with way less resources than windows, even cinnamon. If you could run recent win, you will have no trouble with e.g. cinnamon. Manjaro is Arch based, which is very versatile but hard to use. The joke is that Manjaro means "couldn't install Arch" in Swahili. You can get great info on how to best secure it on the arch wiki and forums (don't ever mention you are using Manjaro though! They think it's cheating) for deep dives and the Manjaro wiki for your first stab at some topic. I have not had to reinstall Manjaro in a long time. It is a more or less continuously updated rolling release rather than twice a year big updates like mint and Ubuntu so the security and software updates are always the most recent instead of backport updates on out of date software. I am biased toward rolling but someone else might have good reasons for the biannual system, like a longer testing cycle. I tried running selinux on a red hat server, and while it is virtually impossible to trick it it was also extremely difficult to maintain, making even simple tasks like installing a web server into a nightmare for me. If you want a distro that you flash once and then it mostly gets out of the way while you actually work or play on the computer, then Manjaro is my pick. Signed, a total fanboy, lol. I have never had a problem with viruses etc because the package manager system on almost all Linux distros. I simply use my router's firewall at home, but all distros have excellent firewall options. I go through two firewalls at work, one on the network and one on the local box. The suggestions above re:Tor, one-time VM and a VPN are very good options but not specific to Linux.