The annoying bugs that I was plagued with on my Ubuntu 12.04 installation seem to have gone now that I have installed the Linux Mint 12 x86_64 DVD. I have the Cinnamon desktop running and it is even better than the modified Gnome 3 desktop that the standard Linux Mint installation provides. The MATE desktop is available on the live DVD, but Cinnamon is even better and uses desktop effects to offer some eye candy whilst you use your desktop. With Linux Mint 12 type: sudo apt-get install cinnamon to install the Cinnamon desktop. The Linux Mint distribution is ranking higher than Ubuntu for a good reason, they actually care about the users. I have Cinnamon laid out with the two panels top and bottom, but I am not sure about how to move the taskbar buttons and the show desktop button onto the bottom panel just like how the Gnome 2 desktop is laid out. You can drag the show desktop button with your mouse to move it, but I can not work out how to grab hold of the windowlist buttons on the top panel and drag that to the bottom panel. But this will be fixed in upcoming releases. There are already a lot of quality themes available for this desktop and they are well worth checking out. The Cinnamon desktop is available for Fedora and other Linux distributions as well, this is looking to be a quality Linux desktop environment that is making up for the existence of Unity. Clement Lefebvre deserves all the applause we can muster for creating such an awesome Linux distribution that is actually worthwhile to use on the desktop.
A Linux distribution should not be enamored with a desktop environment that is full of bugs and is slow even on a relatively fast Linux box. Unity should be consigned to the bit bucket and the default Ubuntu desktop should be Cinnamon. There are many useful applets available here: http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets. This means that Cinnamon wins again, there is a CPU frequency scaling applet you can use for the Unity desktop and that is all well and good, but the Cinnamon and MATE desktops have Unity beat in terms of ease of use and attractiveness. And you may easily install it on your Linux box, whether you are running Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu. The first thing you should do after installing Ubuntu then is to remove the Unity desktop and replace it with the Cinnamon desktop and then make the Ubuntu distribution worthwhile to use, although after testing out Ubuntu 12.04 I am recommending that anyone choose Linux Mint, the Ubuntu distro is on its last legs, due to the damage wrought on the reputation of Canonical by the Unity debacle. I have really tried to like the Ubuntu desktop, but there are too many bugs and of course the horrendous Unity desktop. Just use Linux Mint and save yourself some pain.