Mint has a more noob friendly approach with almost everything having a ui and it is Ubuntu under the hood so there wouldn’t be extra to learn after switching. Popularity wise mint is one of the best stable distros with Ubuntu as its base with community support as well so if you have doubts you can most probably find the answer just by searching
Its fwupd which does the firmware updates , gnome software access it for updates . The cli version is fwupdmgr.