And, as much as Ubuntu generally gets out of my way on the desktop, I find that Mint is pretty good out-of-the-box for the media PC hooked up to my TV.
After looking over those release notes, nothing really stands out as a must-upgrade feature though, other than picking up the latest package versions from upstream.
The package manager isn't the one included with Ubuntu. It has been rewritten from scratch and incorporates Mint Community ratings.
seems to be a distro derived from ubuntu with polished ui and proprietary codecs and drivers preinstalled