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.
I have Mint 17.3 on two laptops, but your Ubuntu with Cinnamon setup is tempting. Any downsides?
There’s a flavor of Linux for just about everyone. For comparison, Mint 17.3 boots in about 30-45, seconds on my 8 year old Vista laptop. Vista takes a couple minutes now.