To be fair to batterseapower: Ubuntu on the desktop could be an example of not-that-mainstream software which doesn't always work well. Unity at the beginning deserved its reputation, that it was a change from a stable Gnome 2 to an unstable experiment.

Guess it is not so bad anymore, but if you liked Ubuntu in production servers, going the route of a small window manager could be more your style (don't know if I'm stating stuff obvious to you, just in case).