Unfortunately the most popular distro (Ubuntu - Canonical) is behaving more and more like Microsoft. I updated to 25.10 last week and it decided to ignore my settings, reset the snap priority and reinstall the snap firefox package, all without my consent. I was fed up when Canonical decided to hijack apt to inject their own proprietary closed-source snap packages, now after having dealt with it again and again after each major upgrade, I just switched to Fedora Gnome a few days ago and I'm not missing anything with Ubuntu.
Debian isn't heading down the best path either with their their policies (keeping the child sex predator on their payroll to do conferences that often times parents bring kids to, forcing the removal of the fortune packafe because it was deemed offensive, openly stating that straight white males shouldn't apply for internship, etc)
I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.
The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.
I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.
Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...
My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).
I'm happy to report that I upgraded my Mint from the previous to the most recent version without any snags. I then discovered I was still on an older kernel version which required a little more research, but went without any difficulties. The second part is admittedly something that not-so technical people will have considerable difficulty in even realizing. But all in all I can say that Mint is a solid, stable, and usable system for experts and novices alike.
Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...
What is unfortunate? You found one alternative was not to your liking, and another right there to take its place. You didn't have to pay for anything. You were not locked in to anything. Now you are not fighting your OS. Seems to be working as it should.
Who are you the people still praising Ubuntu? Where does it come from, this Ubuntu by default thing? Why? I genuinely interested. It was one of my first distros, but that was when they were doing this shipping CD thing. There are countless of distros that are better out of the box, e.g. Fedora. Sincerely, I don’t understand. Who uses Ubuntu these days, and why. Especially on servers, lol. Why not use Debian then?
Privately I'm using Fedora, because that works. But my last two companies are using Ubuntu overall. Maybe because there are so many packages available. It's still far less stable than Fedora. I have to fight stupid Ubuntu bugs every single day. On my Fedora machines it tested OK, so that is my gold standard.
Canonical needs snap in order to distinguish them from all the other Linux distros, so they've gone overboard to make sure that you "need" it.
I think it's horrible that they've taken extreme measures to overtly circumvent their users' desire to run the Firefox distributed through Mozilla's repo.
The following link describes how to overcome the latest version of Canonical's extreme insistence on the snap version of Firefox. It's almost laughable when you see how far they've gone to try to lock you in.
