Eggs in one Linux OS basket

Have you tried debian? It is what mint came in various capacities (at first it was an ubuntu respin, which was in turn a debian derivative, then they started looking back to debian as well).

At one point the things mint did with flash, dvd playback libraries, bundled closed source stuff and whatnot started to mean less, and debian started to get nicer and nicer out of the box as well.

Even without that though there would probably be an upgrade path made to go to debian or something is mint went pop.

@FAST6191 last time i tried debian it was not very under friendly. ill give it another go on a VM.

but as Linux Mint is still fine ill just try debian on a VM for now. what ever the future holds.

With Linux, if a distro dies, another one will take it's place, with the userbase migrating to other distros.
It has happened before.

From a UI perspective, Cinnamon can be installed on other distros e.g. Cent OS.

Heh... I just read an interesting article about this (link). While I'm running mint myself, I gotta admit there is something to it. By the time I got to choose an os for daily tasks, mint was 'just' about the pretty cinnamon anymore. The game of getting everything to run has become mostly standard. Mint shutting down would probably mean that final moon gets further developed for other distros. Yes, it's not fun to do the choir of migrating, but after it's done you'll find it took less time than expected and there are advantages you didn't knew there were.
As for Microsoft shutting down... That will only ever happen when companies rely on it almost no more. But even then : either the source code gets sold to another company (even at a fraction of the current value, it'll be a worth while investment), or it goes open source. So it's not like it'll be cyber dooms day.