Which video editor did you use ? Mint shouldnt fell clunky out of the box, maybe the editor you choose was too much for your hardware, or you had some hardware/instalation specific issue, Da Vinci Resolve is quite heavy on resources, maybe Kdenlive would perform better on this machine.
There are many lightweight basic video editors o linux, give them a try to check if the clunkynes go away.
That and using multiple instances of the browser instead of one instance with many tabs helped me a lot. If i have to switch tasks i go to a new workspace and only open the software related to that task there. Once I’m done i just close everything in the workspace and move back to the previous one that is the same way it was before i switch.