and now... Peppermint!

Time really rushes by, doesn't it? I remember, as if yesterday, when I first tried Ubuntu and got horribly rendered screens and graphics and fonts because the system couldn't deal with my hardware's graphic cards. I tried a few others as well at that time, and the only desktop OS that actually seemed to work was Linux Mint's Bianca release. Now Ubuntu is up to Lucid and Mint is offering Isadora--and both are very good and very accomplished. They're both so good that I double boot my machines these days. [I like Suse as well, natch, but KDE isn't my choice at the moment and the Ubuntu distros are keenly Gnome.] Anyway, Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is a lot of the reason I love them both; and now there is a distro based on Mint. It's cloud-organised and called Peppermint (www.peppermintos.com).
I'm using it at the moment, and it's fast. It's neither Gnome nor KDE, but XFCE/OpenBox--which is interesting, and accounts for some of the speed--but already I like it. It comes with links to frequently-used sites like Facebook, Google Mail and YouTube already factored in, and Dropbox is there too. UbuntuOne is not there (it isn't on Mint either--because they're 'competition'?) but One is easy to install through Synaptic.
I've been using Peppermint for a few days, and it's been fine and friendly so far. The only issue I've had is with OpenBox and the Desktop (but it's a minor issue) and I've installed Arora as the browser rather than Firefox, which has become sluggish on Ubuntu and Mint of late.
It's a small OS to download and runs with a very small footprint. Try it. These are early days, but Peppermint could be built to last.