Update
I used to be an operating system specialist. I’m not any more. I want to use a computer as a tool to get something done, like most people do.
I’ve used Linux for many years without ever learning too much about it. There was a time when I considered that to be proof it had caught up with Windows for ease-of-use. Windows has crashed and burned on me more than once
Things seemed to change when Canonical took their premature decision to move Ubuntu to the Unity graphical shell on the Gnome desktop. I finally lost patience with Unity a few months ago and installed the Gnome Desktop instead. It’s been mostly OK but I’ve had a couple of odd disappearances of freemind (Java) and umbrello (KDE.) Umbrello is running with it’s icons missing and I’ve manually reinstalled freemind. I now have to work out how to add a Java app to the Gnome desktop. This is too hard for ‘us normal people’.
In the meantime, freemind is started from my terminal with the command
sh -c “cd ~/bin/freemind && sh ‘freemind.sh'”
At least that’s nice and simple, if you like that kind of thing. Sadly, I don’t.
Update: I’ve fixed Umbrello. Via the KDE bug system I discovered that Fedora users were short of an icon library so I experimentally searched for the same library in the Ubuntu repos and added it. The oxygen-icon-theme transitional package adds oxygen5-icon-theme.
I’ve updated the bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/umbrello/+bug/1598401
Update 2: It came unfixed the first time I tried to save – after a couple of hours work, obviously. I’ve backed up to paper before applying this workaround:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/umbrello/+bug/1585611
I used the synaptic package manager to add kio then let it sort itself out. UML updates saved, with no loss of data. This is why I use a real operating system. Morning not wasted after all. The Linux love is returning.
On The Outside 
You could switch to a different distro, Mint is based of Ubuntu 🙂
I could but I have never felt the Mint distro maintainers understand the value system necessary for FOSS to survive over the long term, so that wouldn’t be my choice.
Fair enough 🙂
I must be odd; I found Unity hard at first, but love it now, it just seems logical.
I don’t have any problem using it, though I missed having a menu. My issues are with Canonical’s
…(sorry, tablet) move away compatibility with other Linux distros. ‘The Point’ of Unix is code portability. I don’t need phone/tablet/desktop compatibility tying me to one supplier. For that, there’s Apple 🙂
I know this is a bit of a late comment – but, just in case you haven’t thought of it, I think Ubuntu MATE edition, now that it is an “official flavour” of Ubuntu, provides an excellent alternative to the “standard” Ubuntu with Unity, as it integrates the MATE desktop very nicely, plus has some very nice features (Welcome & Software Boutique) of its own – I still use mainly Linux Mint 18.1 (MATE edition) at present, but also have installations of Ubuntu MATE (I’d recommend the 16.04.2 LTS version), and would consider that my next option if I left Mint. Website: https://ubuntu-mate.org. 🙂
I don’t use Unity on my main system. I moved to Gnome but my Eee PC can’t cope. I thought about doing everything in emacs 🙂