I use Mint on an HP laptop to do ruby and Java programming. I use eclipse for an IDE occasionally but mostly prefer vi because it’s extremely fast. I have used various distributions since 1998... Mint is as good as anything IMHO. We use RHEL for server instances and prefer them in production.
A few years ago the Mint developer (Lefebvre?) asked those who supported Israel not to use Mint.
He caught some flack for that, and I ignored him.