There is also lowendspirit, but in both cases you have to be very careful what you buy - not everything that is advertised there will work as advertised or will work long-term
There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.
What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don’t want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?
I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)
Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.
Only issue is they’re stored in my server as belonging to the server user (I assume everything in those directories should belong to root and I can just use chown?) But I also don’t know if they retain the same permissions when backed up.
Not everything will be owned by root, and some of the binaries will be setuid or setgid, some might even have extended attributes (e.g. ping will usually have a security.capability attribute). /var will also have a lot of different owners.
And mainline Linux and a Linux Desktop is still struggling today with power management. Like getting chat messages while it’s asleep.
And the really sad thing is that the power management improvements devs have been working on for the PinePhone are really very specific to that particular device and don’t help mobile Linux in general (so it’s basically wasted effort).