Yeah, did you find mint easy to use? I'm in Ubuntu and thinking about switching. I just worry about driver support, cause everything works on Ubuntu for me. I try and apt get everything I can TBH.
Try Ubuntu Mate, it's actually ok. I'm alot not the biggest fan of snaps. I try and get .debs or apt get, where I can. App Images seem a little odd to me, but Flatpack seems alright.
I would try Vultr, if DO is being weird. They are awesome and have very similar pricing to DO.
Hetzner is ok as well, but they have annoying DDoS filtering.
You could also try AWS ARM EC2, but they're expensive for bandwidth by comparison.
Can you give any examples? We'd definitely like to know where we can improve things for the better ❤️