I haven't tried mint, but Ubuntu is a crap experience on my mac. I had it on a separate partition for a while, but I just couldn't stand all the graphical glitching.
I work in linux all day long, but i love osx. I have never, ever, thought to myself, "man, I wish I was running linux."
To be fair, while at work, I never think "I wish this was osx" either.
I use Ubuntu 13.04 on my work iMac (mid 2011, as I recall, i7 / 16GB RAM) as my OS, with LXDE.
Previous to 13.04 Ubuntu acted very strange and had a multitude of problems. Since 13.04, and with ATI finally having proper drivers it works really well.
Does that have the broken EFI implementation? I only tried to boot linux on a MacBook Pro (17" unibody, 2011 I think) and while it worked, it was pretty annoying. Since the EFI implementation was non-standard, I had to boot with some BIOS emulation layer that started my SSD in IDE mode (slower), prevented proper sleep (forced to do a full shutdown whenever moving locations), and reduced battery life from 6.5 hours to about 2.
If all that's a thing of the past, that'd be excellent news.
