I have never used Mint for any long period of time, so I may not be as experienced as many others here.. The most I've done with it is run it under VMWare just to play around. I quite liked it, and didn't experience a single problem. Whereas it seems as though Canonical has lost the plot, I think that the Mint folk really care about user experience. Out of any Linux distro I have tried, Mint could do the most "out of the box," and with the fewest hiccups. I don't want to use it myself, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the product, merely personal preference.