I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, and this year I forked off to Linux Mint Debian Edition with Mate, for all the reasons cited in the article, plus I'm just fe

I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, and this year I forked off to Linux Mint Debian Edition with Mate, for all the reasons cited in the article, plus I'm just fed up with reinstalling every year or so, and spending far too long tweaking everything to my satisfaction each time. LMDE is a compromise between that and a rolling distribution that is constantly updating the system - it's "semi-rolling" based on a scheme that Mint has come up with of Update Packs that come out every few months. Mate is very smooth and works perfectly on my netbook. I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop with many distros since the late '90s and I've never been happier with it. The lucky thing for Linux is that this was also the year that MS shot themselves in the foot with Win8. With the much-criticized distro ecosystem though, it is much easier for Linux to recover from mistakes like the Gnome3 and Unity fiasco. The bazaar really is better than the cathedral.