
Thanks, but no thanks ...
However, having run Mint since .... 16 something, I'm very happy with it.
Unity was a step too far.
Canonical has made good on its promise to keep on patching the venerable 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu operating system as it emitted updated installation media. damaged box Heads up: Debian's package manager is APT for root-level malware injection... Fix out now to thwart MITM hijacks READ MORE 14.04, …
You do realise that you could replace Unity from the packages in the repos. for something like lxde, kde, Gnome, or even Gnome fall/failback, the latter of which makes the system look quite a lot like Gnome 2 (although the plugin apps need re-writing).
There is even Cinnamon and Mate in the repos, and probably a lot of others that are either ancient or not in the mainstream.
I never liked Unity, but I found a way around using Ubuntu without having to use Unity.
I have no problem with the idea of paying to get continued support for the machines I know of using 12.04 and 14.04 but the problem with Canonical is you have to buy between $2.5k (10 pack VMs) to $7.5k worth per year (50 pack desktops) depending on the combination of minimum budget and minimum number of machines of specific types, etc.
So basically if you have only a few machines it is stupidly expensive!