Ubuntu sees massive slide in popularity, Mint sprints ahead ... but why?

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Jack

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Jan 24, 2011
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ZDnet said:
Ubuntu, once king of the desktop Linux distributions, has slid into fourth place according to data made available by DistroWatch. On the flipside, the Mint distribution has enjoyed tremendous growth in popularity.

Pingdom has pulled together data going back to 2005 that charts the demise of Ubuntu and the rise to power of Mint, and it’s not a pretty sight for Ubuntu fans.

24-11-2011-14-39-03.png


Taking the stats for the last 30 days and comparing them to the averages for 2010 show that Ubuntu’s popularity is down 47.2%, while Mint is up a whopping 105%. The following chart shows how Mint’s popularity has increased over the past 12 months:
24-11-2011-14-45-57.png


Why?
The popular theory used to explain the decline is that Linux users don’t like the new Unity interface being made the default in version 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), which relegated the Gnome interface to being an option. ZDNet’s own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols seems to agree with this theory, while Jason Perlow is overcome with rage whenever he uses it.

I don’t buy it, and for two reasons:

First off, it’s not that hard to disable Unity and go back to the classic UI. Linux users are smarter than the average bears and I don’t see then bailing on their favorite Linus distro because the UI options have changed. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t see the Linux faithful batting an eyelid over this.

Secondly, Ubuntu’s decline started a long time ago. It’s popularity has been in decline since 2005. Unity can’t have been influencing this back then because it wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of the open source developers. While the popularity of Dedian, Fedora and openSUSE have all remained pretty constant (excluding openSUSE’s initial rise to popularity after it’s release in December of 2006), Mint has been on the increase and Ubuntu has been on a steady decline.

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Plexx

I never tried Mint, but before I used Ubuntu, I was on Fedora and Slackware. I tried Suse back in the days and it was way easier than Fedora or even Slackware. Redhat was a popular choice at the time as well. Ubuntu did accomplish a lot and I would have to disagree with the Unity theory.

Moreover, there are other Distros floating around that offer simplicity or portability etc, so it is only fair for Ubuntu and its distros (Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc) to decline over time. Also there were bugs in version 8 and 9 that did upset some users if memory serves me right.

I would like however to know a bit more in terms of usability and security in regards to Mint compared to Ubuntu.

Any user could comment on Mint?
 

jamescv7

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Well still Linux Mint remain as stated in other articles one of the easiest to use for newbies. Beside in interface and features.
 

WinAndLinuxTutorials

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Yeah, Ubuntu was great when I tried the 10.10 version. At the Ubuntu 11.04, they kept a version for the good old Gnome desktop, and Unity was still not a finished product. Unity in 11.10 got some improvements (but still it's unfinished), and the old Gnome desktop was removed. :( Switching to Linux Mint 12 when the final version gets released and I hope it suits my needs. :)

I admit that Unity is nice in design, but its still something more like an alpha build and needs to be developed.

I hope that Canonical learned from this lesson.
 
P

Plexx

Does Linux Mint version 11 come with only Gnome/LXDE or also Xfce?

It seems they also dropped KDE since version 10.

I am willing to give it a try. Will download tonight and run it on VMWARE.

I might as well try out Mageia 1.0 which is a fork from Mandriva (as the website quotes) and Gentoo.
 

silviu_c

New Member
Feb 28, 2011
34
Actually the "distrowatch trends" is a bogus metric and has been for a while. Ask people about Ubuntu and they know about it, ask them about Mint and they might think it's something that makes your breath smell nice.

Sadly, the latest incarnation of OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and derivatives are horrid things. Nothing good can come when desktop environments just go *poof* and change over night. The oddballs are KDE opensuse and kubuntu. The former has a very crashy Apper that dies whenever it has to do some package work (install, solve deps etc) - I guess its function is similar to GDebi. The latter even managed no to shutdown completely over some "Policy" thingy crashing on shutdown. My HDDs shut down but otherwise the comp was on.

So, here I am on 10.04 release with a backported kernel from natty crossing my finger that the next LTS (12.04) will be good. By that time, the KDE devs might have KDE 4.8 packed and shipped too. People seem to like it a lot, even the beta 1.
 
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