I've been using Mint 12 for a couple of weeks now.
It was exciting to install as I'd read a lot about how good it was, even if a lot of the news articles and "reviews" had started to sound a bit forced and repetitive. The general theme of these was "The Mint team have done it again" and "Mint 12 branches into new territory while retaining that polished Mint feel".
I don't agree with this. Mint 12, on first impression, doesn't feel polished at all.
I installed it fresh, having backed up my old home partition rather than migrate it or upgrade from Mint 11 (I'm always wary of upgrading like that). First impressions weren't great. The Mint menu was there, and all the Mint extensions to make Gnome 3 look and function like Gnome 2. But it all felt clunky. The menu looked bad and felt slightly unresponsive. It was freezing regularly. The interface was vaguely confusing. It wasn't Minty at all.
I remember how Mint 11 felt when I first installed it. It was familiar, but felt rock-solid and so fresh, and the ease of use and functionality were invigorating. Mint 12 felt more like when I installed Looking Glass in like 2007 as a bored teenager.
Turning off all the Mint extensions (admittedly due to frustration) gave me a supposedly vanilla Gnome 3 experience. I tried Gnome 3 on Fedora a few months ago and was horrified by how unfinished it looked. With Mint, Gnome 3 is quite nice. The swipe to the top left corner to switch applications feels really natural and quick. There are still some niggling annoyances resulting from the transition from Gnome 2.x. Most of these have to do with notifications. Xchat bubbles, for example, pile up at the bottom of the screen until you acknowledge them. Most of these problems can be worked around and will surely be fixed soon.
Overall Mint 12 has proven to be a bit disappointing. I think it should have been delayed a bit to make it more polished and stable, instead of what seems like a rushed release to ride the wave of hype generated by Unity deserters. Time will soon tell if it can be improved and match up to it's predecessors.
I've started thinking about installing Arch on my desktop. Feels very daunting. Doing some reading.