100%. It’s the goto starter distro for good reason. Ux is familiar, and it works ootb.
They’ve also got the LMDE, which is mint based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. Haven’t tried it personally, but I’ve heard good things from people who are determined not to touch anything Ubuntu adjacent for whatever reason, whilst still providing an ootb environment that is stable and ux friendly.
Ubuntu is Debian based anyway, so I’d imagine parts of Ubuntu have been pulled out to bridge the gap between Debian and mint, but given mint are anti snap; that’s something that definitely wouldn’t be copied over to LMDE (and like you pointed out, is disabled in standard mint anyway).
Someone mentioned commet as a discord like matrix client the other day. I’ve trialled it using my matrix setup, and it looks and feels very clean, I definitely prefer it to element.
Unfortunately as the tale always goes, it’s not quite on par with element in features (it claims to have RTC support using livekit, but I couldn’t find the group call option), but it’s definitely one of the more interesting clients to come about recently. I really like the separation of spaces and personal chats, and the multiple accounts feature is useful from a sysadmin perspective.
Once they manage voice channels with RTC, I think matrix will finally have its discord alternative that could see some adoption with everyday users.