nvidia-dkms has never not worked for me. Arch wiki has more info in the nvidia page.
If this laptop is your friend’s main laptop, I’d recommend going for something other than arch or at the very least preparing before going into it
Your issue seems to be outdated packages, so I wouldn’t recommend distro hopping(especially to something arch based) for just that reason. Look into workarounds for those packages in mint itself. In the worst case scenario there’s also the option of compiling from source.
I wouldn’t recommend distro hopping to arch without some high level understanding of the different moving parts of the OS. EndeavourOS has given me almost no issues but when things break(like grub a while back) you have to be OK with touching parts of the system that just work and are taken for granted on distros like mint. It’s why I don’t consider anything arch based friendly to a “noob user”.
If you’re a “noob user” who wants to learn more you can try endeavourOS, that’s kind of the spirit of it.
GNU is Not Unix is recursive