Yeah, me too. In a sense, I miss running stock Ubuntu, but it stopped making me happy and Cinnamon was my fix. Unfortunately, last time I checked several months ago, Cinnamon only reliably works as packaged with Mint, and becomes bugtastic when installed on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

I don't have major issues with Linux. I've had a few teething problems with new hardware and occasionally there's a surprise, but nothing like the author described. In fact, for me, GNU/Linux is more of a pleasure to run than any other operating system I've used, including OS X. Having said that, I had major issues with Linux when I tried to make it my primary OS for the first time in 2006 and can empathize with the author of this article. I had such a bad experience that I went back to Windows XP and didn't make the full switch until early 2010; I haven't looked back since.

If anything, this article is a call to action to improve desktop Linux. We're all aware of the second class nature of consumer vendor support, and there are a lot of native apps that don't compare to their OS X or Windows counterparts, both in functionality and aesthetics. (GIMP comes to mind. It's ok, but it's nowhere near as capable as the current version of Photoshop.)

Have you tried xubuntu? I went all kind of mint installs for some time. But when I went back to Xubuntu it all fell in place.

Indeed I have and used it pretty much from the time Unity became mandatory up until Cinnamon became stable enough to use day-to-day. I do like Xfce more than Unity, but not enough to keep using it. I actually really quite love Cinnamon and Mint in general, although it could do with a lot of polish, especially the default login manager which isn't the best. mint-update is very buggy too and half the time just doesn't work. Overall though, it's a happy experience and it looks better to me too.