I've always liked Linux Mint. It's been one of my go-to distros for a long time.

Lately though my interest in using it has waned due to the fact it's based on Ubuntu. I'm not a fan of what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu, snap focused, and some of the tracking they've added.

I realize the Linux Mint team does their best to remove this from their fork, but as Ubuntu bakes it in more and more with each release, I'm wondering if it makes sense to drop Ubuntu and focus on LMDE solely instead.

It would also put them closer to the upstream source instead of being a fork of a fork. And at this point I trust distros based on Debian a lot more than distros based on Ubuntu.

What do you think?