I'm not the commentator, but Mint is Ubuntu, except they've already done all of the grunt work to make it useful (like making codecs available and prettifying it up).

At least 2 years ago when I ran it exclusively, it was accurately described as Ubuntu-based, not Ubuntu, just like Ubuntu is Debian-based, not Debian. But the similarities are (or at least were) much closer between it and Ubuntu than Ubuntu and Debian.

I often said I ran Ubuntu when I ran Mint, because there was basically no difference worth making.

Thank you. No difference worth making is precisely why I didn't make it.

What I said was un-supportive and deconstructive, i sincerely apologize. I will try to contribute more positively in the open source community, of which I am a big fan, and meant to disrespect towards.

edit: I have spent a lot of time bouncing between debian, mint and ubuntu as my main distros. To me the differences are huge, and if I could go back and re-write my original comment. I might ask why you switched from mint to ubuntu. I recently moved from mint xfce to xubuntu, and now i am happily using debian xfce.