I faced the same dilemma. I despise snap. I wanted something Debian based too, but I ended up biting the bullet and crossing over to Fedora Silverblue - it's different than the normal Fedora builds, in it's intentional design for Flatpaks + Podman being the core and minimizing system wide installations.

It worked really well for me, and somehow even better system support* than I had with Ubuntu, something I didn't think was possible.

* Better system support: as in 0 issues sleeping/waking from sleep, reading from fingerprint reader, connecting to bluetooth, switching sound output, connecting controllers, and switching between different multi monitor setups. I mean Ubuntu was great, miles better than my work provided Macbook Pro (that is a study in frustration), but the Fedora Silverblue installation ups the ante, pure gnome is also slightly better than Ubuntu's tweaks.