Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint. The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distro

Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint. The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least. Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)