I think I can handle the ads part, but the ‘lighter’ part, thats a good one.

Mint? Is it as slow and bloated as Ubuntu, its base? Didnt you need to make it LMDE to make it faster and lighter a bit?

So the bloat is on the disk, ISO file size, not on ram or performance or something?

GNOME desktop and background processes others distros don’t have?

Why? They just wanna be computer experts, I think. Windows users look like they don’t even care.