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I have alternated between Ubuntu and Mint over the past three years. I thought I had settled with Mint until I discovered that some versions of Mint would not run on some laptops while the latest Ubuntu 10.10 would. I suspect graphics card compatibility with certain Mint versions is the issue. So I resolved to give Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity a fair trial. That lasted a week - Unity sucks. I really expect to see open program icons on the status bar! So, I installed gnome-panel which makes the desktop more traditional. Then I removed the top menu bar and put various icons on the bottom bar. The desktop now looks familiar like Gnome 2 or Windows XP. I have not tried Mint’s forks, but it hardly seems necessary for me now.

... - Unity sucks.

I completely and totally agree. And what's more disturbing, is that many people from the enduser community told the developers over and over again that they hated Unity.

Endusers were both specific and repetitive about Unity and the developers said what amounted to an Obama with, "I am Emperor Obama and I present Obamacare. You little people will do as I command."

So after unnecessarily stirring-up the end-users' hornet's nest the developers relented just a little bit and decided to put a Gnome Classic desktop in with Ubuntu 11.04. At least end-users could benefit by both the new Linux 4.0 kernel and also benefit, IF THEY CHOSE TO, from the new Unity desktop interface. Well, that all changed with version 11.10 because the developers in their infinite wisdom of what the enduser community wanted in a desktop took away the ability for endusers to select the Classic Desktop without Unity.

So the enduser community responded to Obama type edicts from desktop developers with a ... get ready for it ... choosing other distributions of Linux or customize their own Desktops or choose other desktops such as KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc. or endusers choosing older versions where they could still choose what they liked in a desktop.

And what's the result of all this unnecessary upheaval ? ... A Cinnamon fork that brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell.

This whole mess reminds me of the old Engineer's adage; That which is not intended to move, affix it with duct tape and that which is intended to move, give it a shot of WD-40.