Or Debian Testing really. It might not be as polished out of the box but it's a pretty solid and stable experience. Or really any other well mantained Linux distribution, just anything but Ubuntu for the desktop. On the server I get it, ufw is convenient, snaps are not a bad thing in that scenario, LTS releases and extended support are all great if you're not a RedHat shop.
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable
