More obvious choice for an Ubuntu user would be Debian or another direct debian derivative wouldn't it?
So far they are still kind of corporate free in the spirit of doing a desktop distribution keeping things as a normal or dev user would expect without pushing stupid changes in order to advance a corporate agenda.
Also, they are currently based on Ubuntu that they debloat but there is a debian based variant (LMDE) that show future perspectives if Ubuntu become not really usable anymore as a base in the future.
then it's just my pref for KDE that holds me back :)
I haven't tried this, so I don't know if it actually works well or not, but it is apparently possible.
Or use official PPAs for all the snaps that Canonical is forcing on users.