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I recommend mint.

I think its a good idea to try out alternatives.

But if the idea is to get away from Canonical's decisions, moving to a distro based directly on Ubuntu seems a bit backwards.

Check the repos. Mint is Ubuntu + some extras.

They also have a Debian version now:

http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Debian Edition aside, the things people complain about are generally things that Mint removes; in fact, looking at the three bullet points from the original article:

* Unity - Completely ignored in Mint, in favor of MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork, I believe?) * Amazon Search - removed * Mark Shuttleworth - Only upstream where no one has to care about him

+1 Mint. I used Ubuntu, not Debian, because things "just worked." Ubuntu over time seemed to get slower and more intrusive, so I tried out Mint. It is fast, not over complex, and things like media and devices Just Work. I'm a fan of the Cinnamon interface, although in practice I use a minimal tiling window manager like i3 or wmii.

I'm a big fan of the Debian way of doing things. Next time I have an excuse I'll try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition.)

http://www.linuxmint.com/

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