In my mind, Ubuntu is a mass of contradiction, and I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around it.
Ubuntu, at its base concept, I get. They’re “Debian-based”, according to their documentation
Ubuntu builds on the foundations of Debian’s architecture and infrastructure, but has a different community and release process.
So they have no real relationship with the Debian team. They’re not upstream or downstream. They just like apt-get and the funky way Debian configures apache? It just has never made sense to me. Ubuntu is apparently a pretty good desktop OS (I haven’t used it since 8.10), but its LTS concept is a poor excuse for an enterprise operating system. And then there’s Canonical and the apparent attempt to make Ubuntu a product? or monetize it? IDK. They’re doing something but it isn’t clear to me.
If they really thought Unity was the way to go, why not convince the rest of the GUI developers around the world? I can’t imagine that if the powers that make Gnome and KDE and LXFCE and all of the other great window managers out there really thought Unity was where it was going to be, they wouldn’t either incorporate the concepts (making them all stronger) or rally behind a single standard. Instead they are going at it alone and alienating their community in the process.
My thoughts aren’t all together on this.
This article got me thinking about it. Just not a cool way to run an “open source” project, IMHO.
Lost In Open Source 
“My thoughts aren’t all together on this.”
That much is more than apparent.
yeah. i know. def. not my finest hour. I’m still gathering some notes and thoughts on what I hope will be an interesting point or two about Ubuntu that this original article I linked to spurred.
LinuxMint is just waiting for you if you don’t like what Ubuntu is doing.
Am well pleased to hear that mint are forking gnome 2. I have come to love unity (no-one more more surprised than me, esp after the mess that 11.04 turned out to be) but I can understand why anyone would want to stay with what they know. Also when I install linux on non-geeks systems I can offer them something that they can recognise (with a windows background) and something i am familiar enough with to be able to offer help when needed.
I have a great deal of respect for Mint, and this move of theirs increases it. I won’t be using it myself, and I wish that they would have gone for a minty take on unity, but full kudos to them, all the smae.