<p dir="ltr">If you're coming from a machine that was running 9.04 I definitely recommend Mate over Cinnamon, unless it has a decent video card because Cinnamon (like Unity) requires 3D acceleration that I've had falter on older hardware. Mate is actually a fork of Gnome 2 which I believe is what you were running in 9.04 so it should be exactly like what you had, just newer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I've heard a lot of people recommend Mint, but have never tried it myself. I just installed Ubuntu Mate on an old Dell laptop and I *love* it so far. It's not quite an official flavor yet, but they're working on it. I'd go with the 14.04 LTS version over 14.10</p>
<p dir="ltr">Oh, and I think there are instructions for converting from your existing Ubuntu install over to Ubuntu Mate, so no need to reinstall. First you can actually just install Mate alongside Unity though to give it a try - I can't remember if it requires a PPA though.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Also, Unity actually grew on me after a while, so if performance isn't a problem you might want to stick with it to give it a fair shot first.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Hope that helps.</p>
<p dir="ltr"> - Brandon</p>
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