I "sidegraded" to mint 11 right after the dubiously-named "upgrade" to 11.10 which broke the ubuntu 'classic' desktop. Mint had a normal interface and behaved as one would expect. Given how close the base was to ubuntu, the transition went smoothly. And I like green better than whatever undefined color ubuntu is anyway.

I recently upgraded to mint 12 and they are picking up a bit of the gnome3 suckiness - but it feels like they are really being unwillingly dragged into it and are fighting tooth an nail to keep it at bay. It is a bit worse than mint 11, but still a lot better than ubuntu 11.10. Maybe I should give that MATE thing a shot.

The only thing I kinda miss from ubuntu is the inplace upgrade process. Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.

I am feeling that Ubuntu is pushing realy HARD to get into tablet space - throwing-users-under-the-bus-if-need-be kind of hard. I can see the advantage of a Unity interface there, but come on, i had to manually tweak the laptop with powertop to even get close to the battery life I was getting with windows. This will never work for an average-joe-grade tablet.

I know, I know It is free, if i dont like it, I can switch to something else. Guess what? I did. According to distrowatch i'm not the only one. It is a real pity to see a good distro go down like that.