If I were going to use Mint it would be Mint/Mate. It’s just a beautiful DE out of the box in my opinion. I have it on a VM. I stick with running Ubuntu gnome on my xps 13 because that’s what came with the machine although I did add the Xfce DE to it. I guess my point is if I were to use Mint it surely wouldn’t be because of Cinnamon. Mate all the Mate!
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I think I would add to that… use the Mint LMDE version… with Mate if you wish.
I would prefer a Debian base over Ubuntu
I wish Mint would make a Devuan based version.
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I just recently installed Debian in a VM. I was blown away that you can add additional DE’s during the install although like Ubuntu anymore than 2 seem to cause conflicts. I also thought Debian was hard to install but I found that isn’t the case at all.
It has a few quirks, particularly when dealing with grub in a multiboot situation, but in general Debian is an easy install.
I recently did a Debian install inside qemu, and I used the calamares installer which is what you get if you install from a running live image, and that was very easy indeed.
After you have installed, you will discover Debian does not have as many gui setup tools as you would find in Mint or MX.
Just installing Debian is not any harder than to install Linux Mint for example, just more “raw”.
Other distros install lots of packages by default, Debian does not, it’s up to the user to install them if needed. These are the bell’s and whistles which make things much more comfortable to use, such as “right-click-open-in-terminal”, user, group and password management, cups drivers, etcetera.
The default look&feel is also a bit “raw” in Debian, but it’s customizable.
What if you take Devuan, and “conjure” things into it from LMDE which you like in LMDE better? We did such things 
For example, my kids use Mint’s themes on Debian (MATE), and I sometimes use the Mintstick “stolen” from LMDE, also found that Blueberry works way better than Blueman, so dropped Blueman and prefer Blueberry stolen from Mint.
Kind of “Franken-Debian” but works exceptionally well for me 
That should be possible with Devuan too, I think…
I think the other way… start with LMDE and replace Debian with Devuan. I might have to do little more than change the repos.
Nice project , after I finish with Gentoo and qemu.
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Basically replace systemd with sysv. That doesn’t sound to me a simple thing…
Edit: not so hard as I suspected first…
I dont see why I cant replace the entire Debian component of Mint with Devuan.
Why do all that work when Devuan have already done it.
And I prefer Devuan with runit, not sysv.
I know I am hard to please.
Afterthought:
Another option may be to use Bedrock… Devuan with Mint additions
Isn’t that exactly what happened. Shuttleworth sold his soul to the richest megalomaniac in the world. Facilitating the biggest infiltration into the Linux world. Kill Gaetz penetrated the Linux world by buying a seat on the board, created Azure on the back of it, shoehorned the Linux into Windows
I would go with this mate may be older in look and feel but works which is the important part