Well, Mint ditched Gnome, but since I have Mint 20.3 on one machine and Ubuntu 22.04 on this machine, I can say definitively, that Ubuntu is better (newer kernel and latest Gnome). The app store on Ubuntu loads very fast – and the categories do take some time to populate, but if you do the update and upgrade commands, they populate much faster… and once they’ve been populated once, they are lightning fast the next time they are loaded. Mint lacks the device integration smoothness that Ubuntu has.
I honestly believe that Gnome is still the best option – and Canonical – as well as all of the community development team – knows what they are doing 
I am also a Mint user, but I believe that Mint (Cinnamon) is better for Windows 7/8 machines, and Ubuntu (current) is better for newer machines.
This thread has run it’s course for the 22.04 cycle…and 22.04 has been released for over a month so suggested changes would require a time machine. So I’m closing this thread.
There are a lot of good ideas. Keep in mind a couple tips:
- Make suggestions very early in the release cycle!
- Be patient. Really big ideas often require more than one cycle to implement.
- Route your suggestions to the right team: Ubuntu is merely a distro. Many suggestions need to go upstream to reach the right place.
- Progress is driven more by participation than by posting. There are LOTS of ideas; there are fewer people to implement them.
- Make sure it’s really a suggestion, and not something else.