Take the most popular (for now) distro in Ubuntu, remove the proprietary Canonical stuff that makes people say eww, and give the UI some polish and you basically have Linux Mint. And if you REALLY want to reject Ubuntu in its entirety, they do have LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
Smelly you say? May I recommend you apply some Mint with Cinnamon to spruce up that computer of yours?
https://linuxmint.com/
Take the most popular (for now) distro in Ubuntu, remove the proprietary Canonical stuff that makes people say eww, and give the UI some polish and you basically have Linux Mint. And if you REALLY want to reject Ubuntu in its entirety, they do have LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).