In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely. If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all you

In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely. If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all your software from source. As I understand it, Mint is Ubuntu with a different window manager and all of the closed-source extensions to handle common media formats, that you would normally have to faff around apt-get'ing, pre-installed. It's a desktop Linux for people that either don't know much about Linux, or don't want to get down in the weeds messing and spending hours configuring to do the 95% use cases.