Disgruntled Ubuntu Unity Users Flock in Droves to Linux Mint | Hacker News Reader

Disgruntled Ubuntu Unity Users Flock in Droves to Linux Mint

royal.pingdom.com

13 pointssutro19 comments

Really? Twice in one day. I'll paraphrase myself from the last post:

Distrowatch stats are based on hits to distro pages on their 'informational' website. They don't reflect downloads, active installs or anything tangible beyond interest in a platform based on their #3 ranking for 'Linux Mint' in Google. Even the graph used on this pingdom blog say "Distrowatch's page hit ranking (Nov 23)".

In fact the Google Trends referenced below as "gage the interest in" stats are _more_ likely to be a barometer of real-world popularity as google searches will include a considerable amount of people looking for support for their own (current) platform, not just 'about distro X'. Hence Ubuntu's higher numbers.

It's not even fair to Alexa to call DW the 'Alexa of Linux popularity' the stats are that skewed from reality.

I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy, and fair credit to Mint for providing another truly viable user desktop distro, but I do get tired of the annual trotting out of bogus stats and misinterpretations for the sole (successful) purpose of flamebait, originally on slashdot, and now apparently HN.

If this article is inaccurate and flamebait-y then why don't we flag it so that it is removed from HN?

P.S I thought the same and hence flagged it.

The problem I have with this is that Ubuntu does not require you to use a particular interface. I run Ubuntu with Xfce all day, and I have a few other environments installed for testing purposes.

I don't understanding switching distributions solely because of the default desktop environment. It's only a default, not a requirement.

Everything I've seen from mint is that the people switching to it can't or don't want to install something as simple as a media player or a font, let alone a whole new DE.

When you install on multiple machines it's going to be a pain point, and knowing that the prime focus of Canonical looks to be Unity support there's understandable concern from users that their DE of choice will be sidelined (look at the complaints from Kubuntu users over the years regarding Gnome's preferential support).

I've run Ubuntu for years on multiple machines, and took a look at Mint in the past couple of months on this basis. A well put together distro, but until they change their policy of baked-in search hijacking on the browser, I think they'll have a hard time winning over the 'droves' being talked about here.

Mint's policy of having a custom Google search (that resets itself upon every browser update) in all their browsers[0] is rather off-putting.

I personally have switched over all my non-technical friends to Lubuntu[1]. It has proven to be fast, simple, and trouble-free. It follows the Windows metaphor very closely, which has made the transition painless for even those who know as little about computers as they can survive with.

0: http://stevehinesley.com/tutorials/linux-tutorials/linux-min...

1: http://lubuntu.net/

+1.

Ubuntu has excellent repositories; just can't bring myself to switch away. So I started looking at alternatives. I spent a week trying to use Kubuntu before realizing it was a lost cause. I had a few bad experiences with Xubuntu in the past so I skipped it, but Lubuntu works perfectly - even in this virtualbox environment running on Windows 7.

I do think a lot of people will be put off by having to learn xrandr, but not me. I also replaced the lack of any tiling mechanism with Pytyle.

    xrandr --newmode "1680x1050" 146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
    xrandr --newmode "1440x900"  106.50  1440 1528 1672 1904  900 903 909 934 -hsync +vsync
    xrandr --addmode VBOX0 1440x900
    xrandr --addmode VBOX1 1680x1050
    xrandr --output VBOX0 --mode 1440x900
    xrandr --output VBOX1 --mode 1680x1050
    xrandr --output VBOX1 --left-of VBOX0

> I do think a lot of people will be put off by having to learn xrandr, but not me.

None of the people I've helped out have had 2 monitors (I doubt any of them know it's even possible, or would want a second monitor even if they did), so I've been able to avoid that problem so far.

For my own personal purposes (I run Arch Linux, but it's much the same), I've set up a shell script that, based on which monitors it detects as being connected, runs a specific xrandr command to configure my monitors. This works for switching between home (two external monitors, disable laptop monitor), work (enable one external monitor and the laptop monitor), and else (enable only laptop monitor).

For those few times when I have a nonstandard monitor setup (usually when giving a presentation somewhere), I start out with the 'else' configuration and use ARandR[0] to manually add any additional monitors.

0: http://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/

I must be one of the few people that actually like Unity :)

But I really don't get why people would bother to switch distros just because of Unity. My mum is just fine installing things from the software centre, and with a minimal amount of guidance could install LXDE. I can imagine average Ubuntu users would be capable of following online instructions to get LXDE/XFCE.

I'm also a fan, but only on my fairly large multiple-monitor setup. I find it's consistently getting in my way (or staying out of my way) at the wrong times on my thinkpad.

Which is why I wonder the same as you - as on my netbook and thinkpad, I just installed LXDE via software center and carried on. Quite nice how well that works, actually.

Quickly querying Google Trends with keywords that aren't as stupid as the ones used in the article: http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu+%2810.10|11.04|11.10%2...

Ramblings from the Pingdom team are ramblings.

The "Top 5 desktop Linux distributions" chart (the first one) shows Ubuntu declining steadily from 2005 until now. There's no dramatic drop with the introduction of Unity in 11.04.

It DOES show Linux Mint becoming very strong in the past year all of a sudden, but, at least from that graph, it doesn't look like it was Ubuntu users who "flocked" to Mint.

I switched to Fedora myself, but haven't tried Linux Mint yet. Does Mint offer anything that other run-of-the-mill distros don't?

I also use Fedora. Mint is an Ubuntu derivative, so basically any tutorial about Ubuntu will also work for Mint, which I think is a big plus.

There is LMDE too: Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is based on Debian testing (so it's a rolling release).

One way to distinguish between distros is package management. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and other Debian derivates use apt/deb. Fedora and other RH derivatives use rpm. Other distros use whatever they use.

If you don't care one way about package management, then you might care about which versions of packages are supported by default. For example, this is Lubuntu's (essentially Ubuntu's).

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lubuntu

You can check other distros' package versions there too, as well as package management, file systems, etc. Of course nothing says you can't install whatever version of whatever package on whatever distro that you want, but it's nice to know from where you'll be starting.

nonsense. Everyone I know is moving to Debian.

Your anecdote doesn't match up with the link's more solid evidence...

The link's evidence is not solid. It's Distrowatch.

This article means almost nothing.

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