Yes. Flatpak, not Snap.

[addedum] it has been my daily driver since I switched away from Kubuntu a few years back for the aforementioned reason.

As much as I appreciate projects like Linux Mint improving portability for projects like GTK (against GNOME’s wishes), Linux Mint and PopOS have a similar dependency issue of being dependent on Ubuntu. To what degree each project is I don’t know, but personally I’d use something that is either entirely independent (Alpine, Void, Gentoo, Devuan, Debian, etc), or at the very least not a fork of a fork (especially in Ubuntu’s case with how many poor decisions Canonical are making in regards to proprietary repositories and telemetry).

Devuan or Debian aren’t exactly hard to set up with a similar environment and interface to Ubuntu, and otherwise function in a very similar fashion, so if you want something like Ubuntu without the shittification, use one of those.

EDIT: A commenter pointed out that LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) also exists, which is a Debian-forked version of Linux Mint, rather than Ubuntu forked.

It’s hard to make direct “better” or “worse” comparisons between distros. Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages. They’re really similar and offer similar beginner-friendly experiences. I disliked that popOS doesn’t use Grub, I ran into issues getting the bootloader to show my windows drive.

It’s not either, but I like Fedora.