[ekianjo]

I was using Mint until last year until I switched back to Ubuntu again last december, for 11,10. I was not really looking forward to that since I had heard so many things about Unity being a horrible choice and so on. I was pleasantly surprised that it was far from being the broken interface many people were screaming about. It may not be perfect (I still prefer KDE for several reasons) but it is, nevertheless, functional and it does the job.

Mainsteam users who can't adapt to those kind of changes are not going to use Ubuntu anyway. Windows is already very good at keeping its interface consistent from one generation to another.

I see no reason to hate Ubuntu for their choices - I don't think they are after market leadership, they want to make a place for themselves, and differenciation is key to achieve that. And at heart, Unbuntu still retains a number of qualities like stability and relatively good compatibility across a large range of hardware.