Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?
Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard.Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together.There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New users aren't going to switch to ubuntu because there's a start(or applications) menu. Canonical has to genuinely create a usable, unique user experience that ubuntu can call its own.  It's not there yet, everyone knows. But saying people should just switch to something else and poo-pooing all over canonical isn't going to help make (desktop, mass user facing)linux the best it can be.If you really care, get involved. Go to askubuntu.com and answer some questions. Make blog posts that illustrate how you'd improve unity. Write some code. Ubuntu is foss. Canonical neither charges for it nor sells hardware, and I'd say they're doing pretty good in spite.All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity.