There is a fresh mint(ed) flavor on LinuxMint now. In the last one month, it has scaled the distro charts and is now the number one distro for opensource users. Distrowatch,
the unofficial platform for all Linux distros, shows that LinuxMint has
been has had the maximum number of hits in the past few weeks to become
the most popular distros today.
This meteoric rise is largely due to two
factors-usability and functionality. It is but natural to assume
LinuxMint to be a spin-off of the ever-popular Ubuntu distro.
LinuxMint is surprisingly the brainchild
of Clement Lefebvre and a continued source of inspiration to, the now,
millions of its users.
Mint has been able to build its user base largely to the intuitive and clear interpretation of community’s needs by Lefebvre.
Lefebvre himself admits that brilliant input from the community itself becomes the basis for the upcoming release.
As the project leader and the
decision-maker that he is, Lefebvre has proved to be the visionary
leader as well as he contributes to the ‘bigger features’ and allows for
the development of Software Manger, Upload Manager etc. The bottom line
however is that quality is more important, than delivering on schedule.
Hence, largely schedules are not announced until new updates achieve
the desired quality standards.
In retrospect, as users, this is a
feature that has largely contributed to the success of LinuxMint for the
desktop, especially during the last few months.
First, LinuxMint always has features
that users like to use. There are not too many features, forced on them,
until they elect it remain or propose be included.
This high-level of user-chosen features,
coupled with some tight development and consistent quality only adds to
user experience.
Contrast this to what suddenly happened
at Ubuntu. Ubuntu, with a large business/corporate user base too, all of
sudden decided to upgrade technologies and out-of-the-blue came Unity
the desktop that brought tablet/mobile user patterns to the yet largely
desktop-user Ubuntu community.
The rather arbitrary manner in which
Unity, with its host of unfamiliar features, failed to provide what the
user community needed, did lead to a loss of faith. Users found new
faith in the familiar with LinuxMint as it continued to offer what was
good Gnome 2.3 desktop. The same story was repeated with the entry of
the sudden overhaul Gnome underwent to reach Gnome 3. The changes within
the Linux 3.0 kernel in some ways too contributed to Ubuntu’s loss of
popularity.
Where earlier LinuxMint had its loyal
set of users, all of a sudden, in the months after Unity and Gnome 3’s
debut, there was a sudden deluge in the number of users rising upto a
growth almost doubled (40% more users).
LinuxMint is everything Ubuntu should
have been. Instead Ubuntu is today, perhaps grown beyond community-user
needs and looks towards enterprise services.
This has definitely left a lot of room for true open source philosophy to emerge, through meaningful distros like LinuxMint.
Shall we say with conviction, that today, LinuxMint is the Linux Success story that Ubuntu failed to be!
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