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As someone's who has exclusively used Linux since early 2000s, I never saw the aspiration for Linux to ascend to mainstream popularity on the desktop as somethi

As someone's who has exclusively used Linux since early 2000s, I never saw the aspiration for Linux to ascend to mainstream popularity on the desktop as something I favoured. I wanted feature parity - browsers, plugins, sdks etc. - and for several years these have all been released near simultaneously. The 'mainstream' ambition required stripping out the fragmentation/customization which has always been one of the biggest draws for me. Unity is the eventual conclusion of this goal - the pursuit of generic, supportable 'usability'. As for the premise of the article, the massive skew in Distrowatch's stats are deeply misleading. It's not downloads or active installs, it's hits to an informational page. DW is #3 on Google for 'Linux Mint' so it's a barometer of general interest, but the only conclusion you can draw is 'the negative reception of Unity as default was capitalized on by Mint to drive interest'. Not to say it won't result in an upswing in Mint installs (I was considering it myself until I discovered the baked-in search engine capture), but DW stats make Alexa look like a paragon of accurate reporting.

klintron 15y ago
"The negative reception of Unity as default was capitalized on by Mint to drive interest." That's a good hypothesis, though in that case I would assume the surge in interest in Mint would be accompanied by at least steady interest in Ubuntu instead of a drop. Also, the interest in Mint has been rising for quite some time and interest in Ubuntu has been decreasing steadily. This could just be that by now everyone who's interested in Linux knows all they want to know about Ubuntu, but interest in alternatives is starting to increase. My premise has less to do with the particulars of the exact numbers of Ubuntu vs. Mint users, and more to do with the fact that there's not really a go-to distro for new users anymore. Ubuntu, Mint and Peppermint are all contenders for this role, and openSUSE and Fedora are still options as well. I think this lends to an uncertainty about which to choose and which will have continued support. The problem is compounded by the fact that a lot of applications are being accessed from browsers and/or mobile devices, so that even as Ubuntu could be gaining power users its pushing power users away in an attempt to gain mainstream users that they may never get.

klintron 15y ago

"The negative reception of Unity as default was capitalized on by Mint to drive interest." That's a good hypothesis, though in that case I would assume the surge in interest in Mint would be accompanied by at least steady interest in Ubuntu instead of a drop. Also, the interest in Mint has been rising for quite some time and interest in Ubuntu has been decreasing steadily. This could just be that by now everyone who's interested in Linux knows all they want to know about Ubuntu, but interest in alternatives is starting to increase. My premise has less to do with the particulars of the exact numbers of Ubuntu vs. Mint users, and more to do with the fact that there's not really a go-to distro for new users anymore. Ubuntu, Mint and Peppermint are all contenders for this role, and openSUSE and Fedora are still options as well. I think this lends to an uncertainty about which to choose and which will have continued support. The problem is compounded by the fact that a lot of applications are being accessed from browsers and/or mobile devices, so that even as Ubuntu could be gaining power users its pushing power users away in an attempt to gain mainstream users that they may never get.