A lot of people don't like Unity or Gnome3 and think that the UI is unusable or made with tablets in mind. Sounds familiar when I think about it actually. Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu without some of the crud (depending on how you look at it) tacked on. They include more proprietary software (mostly plugins and codecs) with the distro so you don't have to download them, and they have their own version of Gnome Shell called Cinnamon and they also forked Gnome 2 and called it MATE. It's not bad actually.And whats the reason behind that?