sounds like it works then
"Or at least, it doesn't play nicely alongside Unity, which I wasn't able to use again until I had un-installed Cinnamon 2.0."
Sounds like something Ubuntu should adopt!
I'm still on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS desktop even though it's out of support mainly because I'm so used to the GNOME 2 interface it has. I have no interest/reason to change, though eventually(I've decided that time will be when I get new hardware that doesn't work with 10.04) I'll have to upgrade to something and Mint or Ubuntu with Cinnamon sounds like the next best thing.
Firefox may not be getting updates anymore on 10.04 but I suppose the upside to that is it's stopped breaking shit every few weeks as a result. I run firefox under sudo (to access another user account not for root) under a 'firefox' account that has limited rights(which makes some things complicated as I have to trade files between accounts in /tmp), and java stays off most of the time, along with flash click to run, security wise just being on Linux I don't feel there is a huge threat to me.