Trouble with Ubuntu 10.04?

Is anyone having trouble with the newest version of Ubuntu?  I am having all sorts of trouble.  Sound and flash issues mostly.  Also my Compiz settings keep going back to simple.  In order to get Compiz to keep my settings I had to take out the program "compiz-check" which says that it checks your system to make sure you can use compiz settings.

Of course I use Linux Mint, but did have Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 installed for a short while.  The same problems seem to show up in Ubuntu.  The sound may work better than I think it does, but there are just so many choices for sound servers that I honestly cannot figure out which one to use with my system.  I understand that I could get someone in the forums to help me out--and surely I will try--It is just that as of Mint 7 everything seemed to be working just fine on my machine.  Starting with the next release things seem to quit working as well as they did.

I am seriously considering going back to Mint 7 even though it is no longer supported.  Is anyone else having the same problems I am?  I would surely like your input here.  I even had to switch from the 64bit version to the 32bit OS so that I could get flash to work well.  Now I can get pop outs to work while streaming video on Hulu while using Firefox although I still have to use the Chrome browser if I want to read news articles that have a lot of youtube videos embedded in them.

While many things may be much better in these newer releases, it seems to me that they are getting less and less ready to go after the install process.  I thought the idea behind Ubuntu was to get an OS that was more like Windows in as much that it was ready to go after the initial install.  I thought Mint 7 did this very well. Now it seems that in making the OS better they are leaving so much to do after installing that it is more difficult for the average person to finish setting up his or her system.  For instance,  the sound server that is automatically configured on install no longer works well on my system.  When I looked at the preferences there were so many different choices in servers for sound that I honestly had no idea which one to choose.

Is Ubuntu leaving too much up to the end-user?

If they want more people to switch from Microsoft it would seem to me that initial configuration would be better.  In my opinion, the people that want to choose there own settings will use a different OS such as Debian or possibly Gentoo.