No hate to Ubuntu LTS (my old OS) as I think for an entry to Linux, it’s about the best there is, and then I just got used to it and then I started getting more and more annoyed with Snaps.
FFWD a couple of years and I decided to switch to Mint but I wanted something that was entirely free of Snaps, not just blocked, so LMDE seemed the best fit. I get all the good bits of Mint without the Canonical enforced stuff. It’s been running a week now and after plenty of tweaks (installing Gnome for example) looks and feels exactly how I wanted it without interference from Canonical.
The install process mainly - it used to hang quite a lot for me. But, maybe that was something I had misconfigured.