Submitted by “Ubuntu, once the darling of desktop Linux and the overwhelmingly popular choice for newcomers, may soon lose that role to Mint.” I switched to Mint KDE, and have no intention of going back. By the way, KDE4 is finally good (don’t hit me, Aaron) – fast, fluid, stable, pretty, and thanks to its versatility, a joy to use after a few hours of tweaking. Just… Please, unify Plasma and the regular widget style. This is insanity.
I think it is pretty safe to say this has already happened. The question now is will Mageia over throw Mint.
Safe to say? You must then have some good sources, right (distrowatch doesn’t count).
There is not a single good source that can accurately measure the most popular linux distributions. But take a step back for a moment and watch the world around you. Linux Mint is slaughtering Ubuntu on the desktop. I have no doubt Mint has surpassed Ubuntu on the desktop.
Show even one source that isn’t anecdotal, and provides an objective measure.
Find a single source to back up this hefty claim.
Wikipedia, as one of the top ten sites on the web, is as good of an indicator as we are ever going to get.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSys…
From Wikipedia’s Traffic Analysis:
Linux Mint 11 M 0.01%
Linux Ubuntu 1,189 M 0.69%
It’s not even close. According to these stats, Mint is behind not only Ubuntu, but Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and Mandriva.
I use Linux Mint MATE 14 and whatsmyuseragent.com says:
Your User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0
Then Wikipedia is not a good indicator. Maybe that 0.01% is LMDE, I never tried it.
Trends are also notable: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/
For example, comparing 2012-10:
Linux Mint 11 M 0.01%
Linux Ubuntu 1,189 M 0.69%
with a year earlier, 2011-10:
Linux Mint 17.3 M 0.01%
Linux Ubuntu 522 M 0.41%
Yup, Mint decreased somewhat, Ubuntu nicely grew (and is in fact the only notable non-Android Linux which did so over that year)
Myself, I’m thinking of going back to Debian. I may have to tweak a bit more, and I may not be as “up-to-date” on everything, but I’m starting to lose interest in the “shiny”.
Mint is not the most widely used distro regardless what Distrowatch says. Ubuntu is still the front runner by any metric that is actually based on data. So you are using a distro based on the front runner with pretensions of greatness that it cannot hope to live up to. Mint is dividing its eggs into too many baskets and is bound to come up short. It is just a matter of time before people realise this.
Mint needs to decide on one desktop and it can’t seem to do that. As for Mint KDE why use something that comes out a month or two after Ubuntu after waiting for six months for changes that you can get in Kubuntu right away?
The biggest problem with Mint is that it cannot sit on the fence forever. You need to make decisions that will eventually PO some of your users or you are not making the right decisions. You cannot be everything in the quest for popularity which is what they are trying to be.
It is no longer the most newbie friendly distro. It does not have an upgrade tool. It requires the user to make too many up front decisions. Mate? Cinnamon? KDE? WTF are they anyway to a refugee from Windows which offers zero choice?
Ubuntu has the right strategy. It is adding value. While Mint is trying to recapture the past, Ubuntu is moving forward at a pace that Mint cannot hope to compete with. Besides GNOME is a dead horse to flog. Basing two of your three desktops on a loser is not a good option, IMO.
I am NOT an Ubuntu user. I have used KDE for over ten years and started with Mandrake. I like most distros, but Mint totally baffles me. It is neither fish nor fowl and I do not like that. I respect Clem and wish that he would get off the fence and decide where to concentrate his efforts and quit reading his press clippings.
I remember PCLOS only too well with its pretensions of being more than it was.
Edited 2013-01-03 23:05 UTC
Except that all derivatives including
mint have an Ubuntu ID string so those metrics are invalid.
Those are some very valid points you make.
Personally I feel Mint is one of the most pleasant distros to use. Never gives me problems, it ‘just works’ out of the box. And purely from a tech-savvy end user’s viewpoint, it’s nice to have options.
But even for me, all the different releases they offer are confusing and the bennefits are not always clear. I had to spend a day testing both the Cinnamon and the Mate releases, just to get a feel for the differences and options. I don’t think most new Linux users want to spend that kind of time. They want an OS that is ‘best’ and where they feel they are not left out in the cold with their questions or problems.
More importantly, from a marketing angle, I think Mint is very careless with their brand management. Their original selling point was that Mint was Ubuntu that just works, without the need for any post-installation tinkering. But they never quite managed to develop that into their own premium product. Right now Mint seems to be more like a collection of rebranded and upgraded products. A kind of Linux tuning service, if you will.
Like you, I feel Mint really should cut down the width of their offerings, and aim for a more focussed approach. Perhaps even purely concentrate on a single release (perhaps LMDE, my favourite at the moment). There are only so many disenchanted Ubuntu users you can win over…
Ridiculous assertion. Linux Mint has 5 flavors, and one of them is the best OS I’ve ever used. How do the other 4 effect that? They don’t.
Linux Mint 14 xfce edition is the fastest, stablest, easiest to use OS I’ve ever installed. I installed it on at least 20 machines over the holidays.
Not one complaint.
Not ONE.
Because you don’t know which of these ‘Mints’ is the good one?
Don’t say well, you need to try them all to see which is the best for you, that’s the kinda the point that the original poster was making.
Whatever you may feel, I and have many others found Mint to be exactly what the Linux desktop needs. Ubuntu has been progressively becoming overly commercialized, and Unity along with GNOME 3 are both regressions in terms of usability and functionality compared to traditional desktops like KDE4, GNOME 2/MATE, and XFCE.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the quality of Ubuntu releases has been declining, particularly with 12.10.
Linux Mint gives a polished, more reliable Ubuntu, with many DE choices to suit a variety of Linux users.
Why make decisions to piss off users? The way it is now, it offers choice to satisfy almost anyone, and gives a higher quality, more polished release than what Ubuntu offers.
Mint adds value by taking Ubuntu, polishing it, fixing leftover bugs in Ubuntu, and replacing Unity with more functional and less annoying DEs. Ubuntu takes Linux, and makes it less usable by tacking on Unity.
What is Ubuntu gaining by pissing off its users? Ubuntu is losing community support at a pace that Mint cannot hope to compete with.
Yet more unity bashing?
Wikipedia traffic shows that Ubuntu has more than an order of magnitude more users than mint.
The vocal minority that continues to decry the loss of the gnome2 desktop really need to get over the fact that there are a lot of people out there who *really like unity*.
If I switch back to KDE, it will be because konsole is better than gnome terminal, dolphin is better than Nautilus, and kwin is better than compiz.
I’ll make it a unity clone with krunner serving as the dash and hud, though, and I will use kubuntu.
Hopefully the usage of Qt5 and QML for mobile Ubuntu means that they might port desktop Ubuntu to that, though.
The bad things in the Ubuntu desktop are all Gnome.
Edited 2013-01-03 23:10 UTC
Wikipedia’s results have shown to be inaccurate numerous times. They always vary by quite a large margin compared to research companies that do actually do research. Because they are only one organization.
They may not be the most accurate, when even statcounter and netapplications vary by a large amount, but the fact that they show over an order of magnitude in difference is too much to ignore.
Over 7 million downloads of 12.04, in the first 24 hours following release. Mint can’t come even close to that, especially not with Ubuntu having professional support, and becoming largely adopted in enterprise due to its management tools.
Mint is a solution looking for a problem. Don’t like unity, but want ease of use? Run kubuntu, xubuntu, gnome Ubuntu, or any of the other offshoots.
Clutching to the dead gnome2 as though it is some sort of sacred altar is ridiculous.
And instead we should take YOUR word for it . Yeah, ok. How about “No”?
So true. I have come to love Unity — I’ve always been the Alt+F2-kind of guy; I simply loath looking for stuff in menus.
My only gripe with it is that it is barely configurable, and there are no activities, like in KDE (but even there, you cannot e.g. allow/disallow Nepomuk tags based on the current activity, so it also has some way to go).
Also, Gnome just cannot cut it on the application side; the KDE alternative is almost always better. Not to mention the locale settings cannot be customized, and you cannot set the locale only for the GUI.
If you succeed, please let us know — I’d just love a DE that’s like Unity, but is not hold down by the Gnome legacy.
There is a KDE add-on that allows the use of modifier keys as individual keys. Apart from that, adding in the apprunner krunner add-on allows menu search.
Those in concert was all I wanted.
Re: “unity bashing”
Unity isn’t a bad idea, it is just poorly executed. For two releases it was an unstable and slow mess unsuitable for a production use. Now, when most issues have been ironed out, it is all the minor quirks and lack of configurability that come and bite you. Having said that, Unity has all the basic desktop features and I could imagine myself using Unity, which is a lot more than I could say about Gnome Shell.
As for the number of users, I am using Xfce on my laptop yet it still presents itself as a plain Ubuntu installation. I guess that will be the case for all Ubuntu (not just Unity) users unless they have explicitly installed a Xubuntu, Kubuntu or Lubuntu version.
While it is probably true that Ubuntu has a gazillion more users than Mint, there has been a noticeable migration away from Ubuntu, which is a big trend reversal.
For a while Ubuntu seemed like the ultimate distro: good for the power user and the newbie. It really took over very fast and many were thinking finally a distro that can set a shared standard and reduce fragmentation by being just the best, something ISV can target to support Linux.
But now it is more like a different operating system, with its own interface and its own agenda, not just a well put together GNU/Linux distro.
There are many who want the real GNU/Linux OS, non this Ubuntu Linux OS.
The problem is not Unity per se, it’s the fact that they clearly want to be radically different, not only from Windows and Mac, but also from other distros.
Unity might even be a nice software, but its not offered by any other distro, so to me it’s almost like it’s proprietary.
I think it’s sad for the Linux ecosystem that they made such a decision, because we lose our champion against proprietary systems, but in the end they too will be damaged by the loss of supporters and contributors.
I myself have switched to Archlinux, after trying Mint and having found it too buggy.
I really don’t see how that’s a bad thing. The last thing the Linux dekstop need is more of the same old stuff. Ubuntu is a product and as such it needs to set itself apart from the “competition”.
So by this same metric an awful lot of OSS software is proprietary. For example, a lot of RH stuff (like oVirt) only really support RH Linux.
Of course, neither Unity nor oVIrt is proprietary.
But that’s not what trends actually show http://www.osnews.com/permalink?548227
Ubuntu looks like the one distro really growing …and targeted by 3rd party vendors now.
woegjiub posted…
Yes, and of those numbers of Ubuntu users–how many are still running Lucid 10.04 LTS? Or Natty 11.04 despite the end of support only three months ago? I imagine some of those saw the writing on the wall and migrated back to Lucid, which as an LTS would be supported longer.
In fact support for Lucid 10.04 doesn’t end until April this year. With a bit of luck some people might manage to piggyback onto the server release which has life until 2015! Isn’t it a bit early to decide that simply because the system is running Ubuntu still it means that users have accepted Unity?
Isn’t it much more reasonable to assume that the facts aren’t completely in yet, and won’t be known until it is no longer possible to run Gnome 2.xx on an official Ubuntu release?
woegjiub posted…
Are we really a minority? Really? Personally I hated Unity from the beginning from way back when it was still called Netbook Remix. It simply didn’t work as well for me as Gnome 2.xx did. I’ve tried it over and over again at the insistence of trolls like you who insist that if I’d give it another chance I’d grow to love it–if I only really really really tried it with an open mind, I’d like it as much as you do.
I never have. It simply doesn’t work as well for me as the old Gnome 2.xx way of doing things. By the very presence of that vocal number of users who say the same I’m not alone in thinking so.
You want to run Unity as your desktop? Great! No one is stopping you, we just want to continue using the wonderful Gnome 2.xx desktop that drew us to Ubuntu in the first place. Why is that so threatening?
–bornagainpenguin
You seem really desperate to not believe we’re actually using Unity. Why?
Perhaps you should devote your energy toward happily promoting Mint or Debian or whatever, rather than promoting the idea that us Ubuntu users have secretly reverted to a really old server version (really???).
Edited 2013-01-06 02:13 UTC
If you would actually look at those Wikimedia stats, you’d realise they list also some Ubuntu versions
In the latest available http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-10/SquidRepor… Ubuntu 12.04 sees some nice uptake. It clearly led to retiring of many older versions visible in the stats a year earlier, including a big drop in usage of 10.04 LTS ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidRepor… )
Or you can just continue to cling to some conspiracy theories…
They kinda did – Unity 2D was built on Qt technologies. Though it’s retired now…
I may not be able to say much about the data, but the sentiment of Ubuntu for me personally has turned around. After seeing the Ubuntu phone, instead of being happy I was disappointed. Not because the phone or UI is bad, but because the strategy is not one of an open source or free software project.
In the past, people used to leave when projects became stagnant. Today, it seems there’s plenty of development in all of Kde, Gnome, and Unity, but a lot of this work is pissing people off.
The Unix “style” is one of careful conventions and small tools which work together. We are instead heading towards an Apple style of integrated tools, large monolithic GUIs, etc. They all advocate for operational design over elegant component architecture. All in search for a mythical grandma.
Perhaps this is all because the minimalist desktop still exists, and can not really be improved upon further?
TWMs for those who prefer them, or fluxbox/openbox for those who don’t, plus a plethora of console applications and a few GUI apps like Firefox and an office suite are near enough to impossible to actually improve upon.
KDE has been doing things well; tidying code, and slowly adding features. Not sure what is to complain about, except that they mismanaged the 4.0 release by not clarifying it was for developers and not end users.
That’s postmodernist talk! I think there’s plenty of ways to improve plenty of desktop paradigms. The problem is, whenever an actual user asks for an actual feature, or asks for an actual existing feature to not be removed or anything else in the real world, they are met with mythical grandma arguments: You’re not the user, the mythical grandma is the user.
Except the mythical grandma doesn’t exist.
I think it is clear that Ubuntu has a lot more users than Mint. However as I posted before I am currently using Mint because of the Amazon search on the home lens.
So let me say why:
I don’t want my use, of my computer, being sent to Amazon or even Canonical. Moreover I might be behaving illegally if I leave shopping lens on and could loose my job. I use my computer to write reports about children that includes on occasion sensitive information. If I use the dash for local searches some of that information leaks to Canonical and Amazon and I would think in the future Wikipedia the BBC etc. This could be gross misconduct on my part.
Yes I could turn off the shopping lens feature or uninstall it but I shouldn’t have my data transmitted across the Internet by default.
This is a feature I do not want enabled by default for a second reason. I don’t want my Desktop turned into a vehicle for collecting information about me to send targeted advertising, I don’t want my Desktop Gatorised and I think this can be legitimately described as spyware, but possibly more importantly, bombarding me with adverts makes my computer less usable.
I don’t think, however, that Canonical is simply trying to moneyterize Ubuntu but genuinely trying to make Ubuntu more web aware and more useful. Possibly this implementation is simply half baked. I can see that if the feature includes more on line searches and much more user control over where when and how it searches it could be a really useful addition to the Unity Desktop.
I am certainly prepared to go back to Ubuntu in fact I probably will, I’m probably going to go back to 12.04 most friends that I have spoken to using 12.10 suggest that it has more issues than the shopping lens being slow is one. I hope that Canonical put some serious thought into 13.04 including listening to criticism – you don’t get new users by pissing off existing users. I currently think Unity is a better interface than Cinnamon so please Canonical don’t force me away.
I can see many things are going well for Ubuntu Valve, steam come to mind so lets hope 2013 will be a better year for Canonical
Perhaps you should tighten your job, then you won’t have to worry about it being loose.
I’m currently staying on Lubuntu 12.04 LTS while I decide whether to trust that Lubuntu’s Ubuntu base will remain trustworthy in the future.
I may decide to run one of the more unstable Debian builds with LXDE or even to go back to Gentoo.
My new distro of choice is the OS4 OpenDesktop. http://www.os4online.com, Its stable, fast and woks extremely well. Its more customizable than Linux Mint. It has a better application lineup than Linux Mint a it has a more interesting feature set than Linux Mint.
I have been using Linux Mint KDE since version 12 and been using Linux 13 KDE since it was released and I have to say I love it. I also installed Linux Mint Cinnamon edition on my old laptop and it is great. I think the Linux Mint is amazing. Having said that, I believe the great thing about Linux is that everyone can pick their desktop according to their needs and liking. Also I look at Linux Mint as ecosystem of Debian / Ubuntu. Ubuntu has done a lot of positive things for desktop Linux and Mint couldn’t achieve the same greatness if it did everything from scratch.
[comment regarding Debian]
I used to run Debian on my desktop PC but I think Debian 6 came at the time that KDE wasn’t super stable (4.4 I believe) and Gnome was moving to version 3.0 so I think the next version of Debian will be great.
Let’s all go back to wmaker/openstep and it’s comforting shades of gray and lilac. 🙂
Edited 2013-01-04 08:17 UTC
After some tweaking WindowMaker is quite similar to Unity and way faster. Remember volume and xmms controls? Dockapps are great.
Too bad that on a laptop, when I need wifi, bluetooth, phone as a 3G modem and quick brightness control, this will be painful to setup for easy use. It’s not impossible. It’s just hard.
It’s not too hard. There are a couple dock apps out there that simulate the task tray. Then you just figure out which apps you need to run the wireless and bluetooth daemons. You can be done with it in about an hour of googling.
Nice thing is, when you’re done, you’ve got a fast, efficient desktop that loads close to instantly.
Preaching to the choir
I’ve used wmaker as my main wm for years.
I even ran it on my octane as a replacement for imd.
I love it still and I’ve seriously contemplated going back… maybe I still am.
Edited 2013-01-04 11:31 UTC
When Unity first debuted I hated it, but I have to admit that it’s been growing on me. Sure it has a lot of crap I don’t want on my OS (ie. amazon search results, recommended online apps/videos and the fact that it logs everything I freaking do on it), but these issues can be easily disabled or removed and once you do it’s actually a rather nice DE/Shell imho. Although I will admit the fact that the Amazon search feature is opt out instead of opt in does kind of bother me, but not enough to stop using it. I run it on my desktop along with Windows 7. I’ve also started to like the Gnome Shell on Fedora 17 on my laptop once I installed the taskbar & disable search in dash extensions. I replaced the default search with Synapse and it suddenly became incredibly usable for me. Those extensions and that application should be the default. It’s completely unusable without them.
I don’t really understand the Gnome developers mindset (ie. don’t like that they stripped Nautilus at all but I can always use Mint’s Nemo file manager whenever I decide to upgrade to Fedora 18, but once I have something installed I don’t typically upgrade unless I have to). I tend to compare both of them to diamonds covered in sh*t. All they need is a good cleaning
Sure, if you’re a power user who likes to tinker then neither of them are for you. You would be much happier with KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce or even Openbox. The options are limitless. There’s really no reason to bitch anymore. Gnome & Ubuntu aren’t going back to their old interfaces ever. It won’t accomplish anything except for starting online flame wars, and the Linux community already suffers from too much of that as it is.
Personally, I like Unity more than the shell. After three years using Arch Linux I don’t have much of a desire to tinker anymore. I just want something that works. I’ll slap a theme on it and maybe change the icons and fonts but that’s about it
Mint is almost perfect. The major problem is the poor design choice in not allowing upgrades to new versions. The “backup” and “restore” mentality doesn’t work. It’s too much work and no standard desktop user will do that.
By the why, still hate KDE.
“…after a few hours of tweaking” – Exactly why it’s broken.
Edited 2013-01-04 15:40 UTC
Still, none of these distros are a complete product. Look at mint, the new king according to this thread. You can’t even upgrade it. Oops.
Because when I think competent, thrustworthy tech reporting I think The Register. Right.
Ubuntu is only losing ground in the minds of those whith an irrational hatred of Ubuntu and Unity. (Because you know, GNOME 2 is so awesome…or not. Let’s never innovate and take chances again. Surely the tech industry will benefit from that mindset). Making things up doens’t make them true.
There are a lot of rational reasons to hate Unity, especially on low end machines. Innovation is fine, not being able to turn it off when it inhibits productivity is not.
I can’t think of any. “I don’t like it”, “It doesn’t work the way I want” etc etc are perfectly good reasons but also very subjective.
So don’t run it on low end machines. It wasn’t designed to run on those, we have Xubuntu and Lubuntu for that.
Performance is subjective?
But it was, until they added Unity (and subsequently got rid of the netbook version). Sure I could try Xubuntu or Lubuntu but Mint runs fine on my Atom 330/2GB system so I’m not going back.
I am not very keen of Unity or what Ubuntu has become, but as a software stack, it’s light years ahead of anything else. I’m sticking with Ubuntu for now. Linux Mint is alright but lacks its own identity. The fact that is a full Ubuntu upstream will deem it forever the forgotten bastard.
Distrowatch rankings aren’t trustworthy. But they are useful to predict the tendencies of usage.
You can just sudo apt-get install k3b and wait a few seconds and get latest K3B. Try getting K3B 2.0.2 on CentOS 6.3!
Unity is more tolerable than GNOME Shell. Once they sort out more options like the introduction of a menu and the ability to move the dock, perhaps it will gain more adopters. Now GNOME Shell I hate it to the guts. I can’t even stand to look at GNOME Shell anymore. Unity makes some sense in some ways that GNOME Shell doesn’t.
As for KDE, much has been said and tried. In all its life, KDE never had any expression. If the developers focused more on usability instead of Kreating more stupid appliKations I will not ever use, then KDE would be better.
Ironic you mention that but use the example of installing K3B as a pro for Ubuntu.
I mentioned K3B because, just try to install it on CentOS 6.3 by hand… meaning that certain praised distros like CentOS or RHEL are nice but not that practical sometimes.
Also, K3B is not a part of KDE Software Compilation the last time I saw, like Konsole or Dolphin are. Plus, K3B is one of the kdelibs and qt based application that really did it on the platform, although is not updated in a long time and people are moving on to nand storage.
Edited 2013-01-07 14:07 UTC