I don't know anything about Mint, but Ubuntu was quite straight-forward for the most part. I wanted my install to separate the operating system from my personal files, so had to create multiple drives. The most time-consuming part was learning what I needed to know in order to format my drive properly. I would think that since having a separate drive makes upgrading so much simpler, that kind of install would be standard practice by now and the newer versions of Ubuntu would do all that for you automatically. I was told that the Ubuntu team now charges for their disks with the operating system on it... I had mine mailed to me for free.