Good to hear! Yeah once I used mint I haven’t used anything else, even my server is running mint because why not. You say you want the latest packages, well it’s only debian that runs older more stable. Ubuntu and thus mint happily run newer stuff. Mint is also less strict about “non free” than ubuntu so much easier to use in terms of drivers.
I was going to try my hand at JavaScript but got a bit overwhelmed at the number of JavaScript frameworks, npm, typescript… The whole ecosystem seems so fragile.