I have tiling in cinnamon with gtile. Have you tried installing it?
For me the mint community has been a big difference. I have gotten great text support on irc from volunteers, much better than I got with Ubuntu in various places online, where people seem to be swamped with new and clueless users.
I am worried that unity integration will become fully incompatible with the gnome backend, making cinnamon as a de problematic. But so far so good.
Though I am also experimenting with getting fbterm and potentially tmux to play nice when I boot to text console and just ignore the DE altogether for some serious power savings. tmux seems to not allow fbterm to use its 256 color capabilities though. But I have digress.
Ultimately I feel like mint has a lot going for it. Some of the design decisions are not quite what I would do, but the mint team has been awesome about working with other distributions/forks, and even collaboration on shared components.
For me the mint community has been a big difference. I have gotten great text support on irc from volunteers, much better than I got with Ubuntu in various places online, where people seem to be swamped with new and clueless users.
I am worried that unity integration will become fully incompatible with the gnome backend, making cinnamon as a de problematic. But so far so good.
Though I am also experimenting with getting fbterm and potentially tmux to play nice when I boot to text console and just ignore the DE altogether for some serious power savings. tmux seems to not allow fbterm to use its 256 color capabilities though. But I have digress.
Ultimately I feel like mint has a lot going for it. Some of the design decisions are not quite what I would do, but the mint team has been awesome about working with other distributions/forks, and even collaboration on shared components.