Sure. The Amazon search results can easily be removed for a flat fee of $0.

They sell exactly that. http://www.ubuntu.com/business/advantage

Just like how Unity haters destroyed Ubuntu in 2011. Oh wait, they didn't. Ubuntu has even more users in 2012 than they did in 2010.

What kind of support do you expect for $30/year?

So you're saying that not only should Canonical give you Ubuntu for free, but that they owe you not to make any money off you to pay their bills, even indirectly via extra search results that don't cost you a dime and can easily be disabled by anyone who cares?

You do know that Mint makes a decent amount of money via search referrals which is basically the same thing as this new Unity feature. And that's not enough income so they also persistently ask for donations. Would you rather have Amazon search results in your Dash (which can be useful and can easily be removed) or would you rather have Clem asking you for money when ever you visit the official distro website?

Linux Mint isn't any more of a non-profit than Canonical is. Both are companies that are trying to bring in enough income to pay a decent living wage to their employees, while still providing a bunch of free stuff to their users.

Um, copyright means that you can make closed source versions because it's your stuff and you own it. This isn't news, it affects a lot more software than just Unity, and it's nothing to be afraid of.

Because the MATE developers don't know what they're doing... Attempting to maintain all of GNOME 2 by themselves has always been a stupid decision.

Or you could just install gnome-panel and choose GNOME Classic from the login screen. It's more similar to GNOME 2 since it's pretty much the same thing just with more bugfixes and a slightly tweaked UI to resemble GNOME Shell a little more. Oh, and you'll need to hold down the Alt key to modify the panels.

If you're using Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha, all you have to do is install ubuntu-gnome-desktop to get the extra packages. We're not going to make a metapackage remove packages that you already have installed though.

...except that Debian didn't actually make XFCE the default (at least not yet) but that fact was missed by most bloggers and their readers. Source: http://packages.qa.debian.org/tasksel