Personally, I wouldn’t advocate for Ubuntu or anything downstream of Ubuntu (like Mint). Debian, at least, is free from Canonicals corporate shenanigans.
There is also Mint Debian if you want Mint. But honestly, distro doesn’t matter at all to most users. Pick any desktop environment that looks nice to you and go for it.
Personally, I wouldn’t advocate for Ubuntu or anything downstream of Ubuntu (like Mint). Debian, at least, is free from Canonicals corporate shenanigans.
To be fair, Mint does a good job of fixing the annoyances that Ubuntu introduces. It comes with Snap disabled by default, for example.
There is also Mint Debian if you want Mint. But honestly, distro doesn’t matter at all to most users. Pick any desktop environment that looks nice to you and go for it.