This describes me.

There’s plenty of cool things in life to enjoy that gets you through hard times that aren’t drugs. I run a lot and exercise for mental health, etc. Never felt the need or desire to alter my perception of reality. Would rather face up to it and deal with things head-on.

Then again, I don’t really know any different. I’ve always been drink and drug free.

I personally enjoy DDG. Their privacy policy for their search is straightforward and there’s no evidence that they’re not abiding by it. I find it tends to prioritize higher quality blogs and articles ahead of social media results.

I sometime use Brave Search as it seems to do better at giving social media/forum results as they seem to be prioritized higher by it, when I’m looking for more discussion-based content.

LMDE essentially is Debian (uses the Debian repos for most of its installed packages), with some Mint packages included on top via the Mint repositories that are also added. Mint actually has some pretty neat graphical utilities and has Flathub configured to work by default with the Software Center.

The real benefit though is if you enjoy using the Cinnamon DE. The latest Cinnamon version is kept up-to-date in LMDE as the Mint team backport it. The Cinnamon version in Debian 12 is fixed and will not get major version updates until the next version of Debian.

As a Debian user myself, I enjoy Mint when I wish to use Debian on the desktop. I only use core Debian for servers.