Consider Debian without a GUI (i.e. “headless”) if you are setting up a new device in the future. There’s no reason you can’t run mint or mint DE for a server, and the presence of a GUI on the install is not significant for self hosting unless you are pushing the limits of your hardware. The differences between mint and Debian when it comes to how all the kernel bits and service configurations are set up aren’t going to be significant for most casual self hosting situations.

But for now, just keep doing what you are doing. Make changes when you move hardware, that way you can test some stuff out on the new hardware while keeping your current setup running.

I’m looking forward to the day LMDE just becomes the only Mint flavor and they ditch the Ubuntu middleman entirely. They haven’t said thats their goal with LMDE, but given the trend of other distros swapping to Debian from Ubuntu (VanillaOS as another example), it wouldn’t surprise me.