OP wants to get away from Ubuntu, but Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. Maybe that would be reason for OP to disprefer Mint?

What about LMDE?

OP mentioned stability and long-term supported as what he’s looking for. The Linux Mint team have stated LMDE is more for themselves to gather info and not a priority. So I would stay away if looking for stability and long-term support.

“We work on LMDE primarily for us, to get that information. It is not a priority, certainly not compared to Linux Mint itself…” https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4276

That's barely even a real distribution; it's an escape plan for Mint to leave Ubuntu if necessary. This is not a serious suggestion.

Mint so far has avoided forcing snaps, I will jump ship too if they do.

Fedora is much more secure (a strong focus on SELinux, secure boot, etc.). Fedora has more cutting edge software (latest GNOME, gcc, etc.) while still being very stable.

A large chunk of the gcc/glibc/GNOME/Wayland/... developers are employed by Red Hat and Fedora shows that, it's where the Linux workstation is going and has an amazingly good of integration of new tech. Most other mainstream distributions trail by several years.

I would recommend Linux Mint for desktops and Debian stable for servers.

One of OP's issues is Ubuntu forcing snaps. I think Mint disables snap by default:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h...

Another Ubuntu derivative that does not use snaps is System76's Pop!_OS

Isn’t one of the purposes of snaps to allow finer grained permissions? In non-snap systems, how do you prevent that weather app you just installed from accessing your camera and microphone?

It runs as a user without the necessary permissions to access those devices?

So one should configure an alternative user for each group of permissions that any arbitrary app might need? Then what happens the day that I do decide that my weather app should access e.g. my location? Now I should move all its data and update my launch scripts to the new user?

I happen to dislike snaps as well. The hard coded install directory is a passion point for me. But at least the permissions issue they are getting right.

I wish that desktop distros would adopt the Android permissions paradigm.

No, you can create groups for permissions that you'd like to enable and disable and add the user to the appropriate groups.

The snap service tends to run when it wants and it can slow down a system when it runs. Also the snap binaries are a lot larger than with apt.

Honestly, I don't think a weather app would access a camera or microphone. That seems like a bad example. Honestly, I put a piece of tape over my camera. It looks like other posters in this thread have solutions.

Using more hard drive space than needed and not being able to control the service are show-stoppers for a lot of people, and it looks like the permissions issue has another solution.

Here’s why not Linux Mint. It’s a few years old so I’m not sure if these issues are solved but I’ve never heard of Debian or Fedora having these issues: https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/

Fedora is a nice busy, but power user and developer experience: only rolling for the parts you would care about with a year of security support.

Fedora is especially useful for a new hardware workstation with that year of support. Any longer than that in my experience you tend to run into issues. For example: DXVK, for Windows games with Steam/Proton, just moved to requiring Mesa 22.0 as a minimum and Fedora 35 has Mesa 22.1 something. Similar issues with Ruby development in the past.

Updates are more limited, with a few select packages kept rolling compared to a true rolling distro like Arch. When a new kernel series is release (6.0 => 6.1) Fedora holds off for a few weeks to test until 6.0 goes EOL. Gnome is kept to it's major release with only minor versions to fix bugs. Mesa is updated until a Fedora is released. Firefox is kept up to date and I use the snap for VSCode and Chromium based browsers. Most other packages are not updated to major new versions, except for Vim (and Emacs if I remember).