Seriously... At SCaLE this year I saw people from various distro booths taking breaks and visiting other distro booths. Each time they looked genuinely interested and excited about what the other distro was doing.
I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn't use apt, honestly don't like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That's why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I'm on nixos unstable and it's currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
I don't like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.
NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren't programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.
For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future 🙃
If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
You don't miss out on anything if it does what you need.
For me apt is just slow and clunky, don't like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.
I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.
I liked portage because it worked with program's sources so I was able to just remove part's of program's and their dependencies I didn't need.
I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.
Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
nala upgrade
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
Just the pure act of installing a package is longer than with pacman for example.
And the way that apt has seperated regular package and -dev packages irks me a lot when I need a library for something I need to make sure to install a =dev package compared to most other package manager where libraries are installed with the lackage itself.
That first sentence is what I love about Linux bros. For all the supposed gatekeeping and pretentiousness that goes on in these circles, i find this to be much more representative of my experience. As i said elsewhere in the thread, im really not very well versed in all that Linux is/can be. And yet, somehow someway, ive never really felt put down for it when seeking help.
Before this comment, i honestly didnt know there could be such preferences to ur package managers.
