Mint works well on my Thinkpads

Debian

I’ve never done it so I can’t say for certain.

I typically buy purpose built routers which advertise routing speed benchmarks

It’ll be hard to find one at that price. You may find something with a 2.5G NIC but whether or not it will actually route at line speed is highly unlikely.

Your best bet to keep prices low is to add a 2.5G NIC to an old PC. Even that may not work

Markor on Android and Obsidian on Desktop.

All synced with syncthing

Look at Mikrotik. Very affordable and extremely powerful. Only do this though if you know what you are doing with networking

Personally, I’m fine with the Ubuntu base. Canonical does a great job.

I feel Mint takes an already great distro and makes it way better.

I’ve used LMDE and it works well but keeping a Ubuntu base means we can reference soooo many Ubuntu based help forums.

If Mint is already removing the parts of Ubuntu we don’t like then great, let them keep doing it 🙂