Good to hear! Yeah once I used mint I haven’t used anything else, even my server is running mint because why not. You say you want the latest packages, well it’s only debian that runs older more stable. Ubuntu and thus mint happily run newer stuff. Mint is also less strict about “non free” than ubuntu so much easier to use in terms of drivers.
Yeah most of the improvements looked to be from fresh textures, not tracing. They clearly didn’t want to do the tv footage though.