Yes, 6 is better on the touchscreen. In fact, its better on every front. I never used Plasma before 6 and now I can’t shut up about how great it is.

I don’t think Cinnamon (the Mint desktop environment) has a lot of touchscreen support. You might want to consider switching to KDE or Gnome, which might be easier if you picked a different distro, such as Fedora or Ubuntu.

Might even be the perfect excuse for you to try a Universal Blue distro, such as Bluefin or Aurora. They are based on Fedora but distributed as immutable container images, meaning its really hard to bork your system. Perfect for a beginner who wants to experiment without fear of rendering their computer unusable.

Don’t use Windows either.

Another vote for Bazzite, or really any of the Universal Blue images. There is no other distro out that is as full-featured and bulletproof for Linux newbies. Since gaming is important to you, Bazzite is almost certainly the best choice. It comes in both Gnome and KDE flavors. KDE will feel more familiar coming from Windows.