Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it?

Ubuntu is built on Debian’s skeleton. RHEL is built on Fedora. Many more examples.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but in a much deeper and more connected way than Ubuntu is based on Debian. It even shares many of the same software repositories.

The next closer level is how Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Kubuntu are just slight variations of Ubuntu. People like to call these “flavours”.

Finally, you get to the closest layer—the thousands of people who have taken a stock Ubuntu installation and swapped out one or two components to meet their requirements. We don’t even think of these as distros in their own right.

It’s a continuous spectrum, and any labels we try to apply will be pretty much guaranteed to have fuzzy edges.

No. It based on Ubuntu but without all the bullshit. .deb ist standard and flatpak is also built in. Whenever both are available, you get a choice right from the software manager. Mint is very much its own thing and great if you want to ditch Ubuntu.

@Rustmilian classic Mint is basically Ubuntu without snap. Then there’s Mint Debian edition which is built on Debian (sort of insurance if Ubuntu goes Red Hat way).