Wait about a month and then switch to Mint.
The Mint Developers are core contributors to MATE ( a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop), but more importantly they’re doing a lot of work Cinnamon, a native Gnome 3 replacement for Mint-Menu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu haven’t put a Cinnamon package in Precise, so unless you want to try building and integrating it yourself you’ll have to choose Mint. You can choose from a Debian derived Mint or an Ubuntu derived Mint.
From: plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org [mailto:plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org] On Behalf Of Ezra Wolfe
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2012 6:17 PM
To: Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04
That was the boat I was in. Since then I also upgraded my system so
performance isn't as much of an issue as it was. Plus, on Gentoo you
can disable nepomuk, as long as you don't use kde-pim.
Rich
I ran 11.04 on a 64-bit box at home and Unity was painful. Performance was awful. I never upgraded my work machine from 10.10 for that reason. I installed 12.04 on the 64-bit box at home this week and it's much much better. The HUD provides a workaround for all the waiting for the Dash, but the Dash is much faster too. Overall it just feels snappier and I have to say for the first time I am warming up to Unity. I still hate that you can't easily customize the launcher (adding expanding menus, size, etc).
The upgrade wasn't too bad, but at first restart, the load never got past the desktop display. It just sat there and never loaded any menus. Apparently compiz was crashing. I had to remove the proprietary drivers and on reboot everything came back.