Fair enough, I totally agree about Ubuntu, although Mint doesn’t have most of the bad Ubuntu stuff. What it does benefit from is Ubuntu’s superior hardware support, PPAs (most important for up-to-date Mesa) and GUI stuff like Driver Manager/Update Manager. For a beginner or casual user there’s no contest.

Yes, I know Mint is downstream of Ubuntu, that’s how I know it doesn’t include Snaps. What exactly other “nonsense” is there or was your statement just a general LMDE puritan hand-wave?

Which Ubuntu stuff does Mint Cinnamon have? I thought the point of Mint was that they removed a bunch of that stuff like Snaps.

It was a couple of years ago. Continuing enshittification of Windows pissed me off enough to look into it (10/11 restricting of options, CoPilot, various bloat etc).

2 years later, i’m running Mint on my laptop, Arch on my desktop, a server with OpenMediaVault and a miniPC with Batocera. My computer life has never been better!

To be fair, most people who use Windows are ignorant of any of this stuff so while I guess they are technically part of the problem (debatably), it’s not knowingly. With that in mind it seems unwise to tar them all with the same brush and set them up as the enemy if we hope to convince any of them to abandon it.