Interesting. I liked Ubuntu years ago until they went to that awful Unity desktop. I’ll probably just stay with Mint though. It’s been flawless on my ancient laptop and does everything I need a pc to do.
I used Mint 17.3 for about a year and I really liked it. When Ubuntu 16.04 came out I wanted to try it, but I also disliked the “Unity” desktop. When I saw that I could load the Mint Cinnamon 3.0 desktop on Ubuntu, I went for it. It’s really fast, boots in 15 seconds on my Dell i5 ssd hard disk laptop.
I’ve come to like Ubuntu more than Mint because Ubuntu has a larger support team and gets more frequent and earlier updates and security updates than does Mint.
Mint 18 is coming out soon, based on Ubuntu 16.04, but I am going to stay with the real Ubuntu.