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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.

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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

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