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.