Is Mint better than Ubuntu? I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop I had since it ran slowly and it seemed to make it run a bit faster, but someone told me that the company behind Ubuntu is untrustworthy (didn't specify) and was told by another that Mint is just better Ubuntu.
@Rust Troony already touched upon the core points, and I do agree that LMDE is the better version.
Having said that, I would like to add more. Specifically with respect to how Linux Mint handles changes from upstream Ubuntu. The Linux Mint team
generally does a good job of patching up whatever Ubuntu release they're building from, including coming up with alternatives to whatever unpopular decision Canonical Ltd makes. They created the Cinnamon desktop environment as an alternative to GNOME Shell, they actively assist with maintaining MATE once some guy from Argentina forked it in 2011, and they're now responsible for maintaining the Ubuntu DEB port of Mozilla Thunderbird ever since Canonical Ltd made the decision to pivot over to Snaps.
Insofar as Canonical Ltd being untrustworthy is concerned: they most certainly are, though I'd like to point one thing out - literally
every big ass corporation that actively dabbles in Linux, from Canonical on the Debian side of things to Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Oracle, among
countless others, are equally untrustworthy. There's just a sliding scale of how much you're willing to tolerate their bullshit. I can sperg for
hours about various corporate decisions that pissed off countless users, but still got imposed upon us anyway (i.e. Oracle buying out Sun Microsystems and shitcanning literally
all the cool shit from OpenSolaris to OpenOffice.org in 2010, IBM buying out Red Hat in 2019 and then shitcanning CentOS while deliberately obfuscating means of accessing RHEL source code despite GPLv2 licensing requirements).
Canonical is generally predatory toward consumers, everyone else predatory toward enterprise customers. Caveat emptor and all that.