Prompted by this article I’ve been having a play with Xubuntu 24.04 Minimal.
No web browser, no graphical text editor, no curl. Being Ubuntu it does have snapd installed, but no other snaps, so it can be removed with:
sudo apt purge snapd
sudo apt-mark hold snapd
Installing Firefox (& Thunderbird) as debs means choosing a source (I went for the mozillateam ppa) and changing the apt priority of that source, so the system doesn’t go looking in vain for the snap versions.
Other than that, it’s all very straightforward, and very snappy even on an old laptop.