I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

“secure alternative”? Others are not secure?

Jed when you want a simple, Emacs-like editor.

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Sure, but what about your chromium builds? (as mentioned in my post, replacing the firefox snap with a firefox deb is easy enough on Ubuntu, chromium is the more difficult one to deal with)

but it’s limited to Ubuntu LTS versions

Mint would be based on Ubuntu 22.04, but I’d like to have something more up-to-date. I believe all other .deb based distros have the same issue that they are not as up-to-date as Ubuntu 23.04?

XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.