@mcc All I can offer is that Ubuntu has been suffering from general enshittification over the last maybe 10 years, and sharply in the last 3 LTS releases. I've been running LTS Ubuntu releases on Thinkpads for 15+ years and on my desktops for at least that long, possibly longer. Before that was Suse and Gentoo, so I've seen some things, man. Good hardware helps, but caretaking of core packages and overall bloat keeps getting worse. Mint and other derivatives just have different problems.