On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 11:55:54PM -0800, Alice Wonder wrote:
Oh and as far as a silent majority that prefers Gnome 3 -
Ubuntu was by far the most common distribution for desktop users.
It is quickly being overtaken by Mint - with the Cinnamon and Mate builds, not the Gnome 3 build.
Ubuntu switched to their Unity interface, which seemed to aggravate a lot of people. To me, who uses neither, it seemed rather similar to Gnome 3.
I think a large part of Mint's popularity was less because of the desktop and more because it included a bunch of proprietary drivers and codecs out of the box (although these days, it won't play libx265 encoded video without adding a ppa.
I prefer different desktops, so never got involved in the argument--it does seem, judging from Fedora forums that avoiding Gnome (and this goes back to the days when it was Gnome 2) saved me from a great many problems I saw and see on their forums.