I've recently switched Linux Mint as a result of Canonical's new focus on eye candy rather than functionality (I couldn't take the new interface in Ubuntu). Have others gone the same way or is there another distribution I should look at?
I've done so too. It seems that they will not be able to get around the Gnome3 crap in their ubuntu-based edition. They're trying to get out of the mess with their Cinnamon project. I'll see how it goes, but i'm afraid I'll have to ditch gnome altogether and go for XFCE (in Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) for example, they say its a rolling distro too, so it looks even more like a good idea).
It's a philosophy, not a requirement. Mint thinks you should upgrade Ubuntu that way as well.
I just keep separate partitions and do a full install on the ones I need. No sweat.
On the other hand, I did a "ubuntu" style upgrade to 10.04 LTS, and that worked fine, too (I run that on a netbook for their netbook interface). It took longer than a full install on Mint (perhaps being a slower machine had something to do with it), but it worked out ok.
I've ended up looking at Arch Linux (I installed using ArchBang which is probably a little easier/simpler than using the straight Arch installer). In actual daily use I find it about as easy as Ubuntu, but I like the more minimalist philosophy of the distribution. I already feel like I understand more of what's actually on my system and how it's really working.
I switched to Mint a while back, not because of mad h4xx0r skilz (I don't have them), but because it "just works" (for linux). As a happy coincidence, they give me an acceptable desktop option in their custom desktop.
Unfortunately, in Mint 12 my lexmark printer no longer works. I think it's some issue between 3.0 kernel, cups, and Mint, but nobody has quite figured it out yet.
This happens with Windows upgrades too, so please no flame wars here.
I've installed the xubuntu-desktop packages on Ubuntu 11.10, and am pretty happy with it, at home; at work I'm using Ubuntu with the awesome window manager -- but running a gnome-session within that to make some things a bit easier.
Ubuntu is not limited to the default interface if you spend a little bit of time; probably that is far less time than getting to know a new distribution.
I stuck with Ubuntu but switch to gnome + xmonad on fresh installs. If this ceases to be possible in future releases I may take a few days and get set up with arch linux, and then automate that with chef or something similar.
One thing about ubuntu (and the reason i prefer it) is that it works well with new hardware mostly out-of-the-box. If you use it on laptops that is a big plus. If you hate too much eyecandy, xubuntu is an obvious option.
But maybe i have overlooked other distributions that "just work" out of the box.
