The DistroWatch numbers are incredibly inaccurate, yet it seems to be stirring up quite a frenzy. Mint will never survive in the enterprise due to the fact it comes with proprietary stuff out of the box. If Mint grows big enough, it'll become a problem for them. Ubuntu plays it safe, and while not as user friendly (thanks U.S. Law), it requires the user to initiate the download/installation of certain proprietary codecs and drivers which thereby negates any illegal activity in the matter. I have yet to see a SINGLE Mint machine in the enterprise. Ubuntu machines? Thousands. Easily thousands.
That said, sometimes that doesn't matter as Apple demonstrates. Far more people are ditching Apple in the enterprise than ever before, yet Apple is no tiny game player here, thanks to the footprint they're brewing up in the home user department, which is likely where (if anywhere) Mint has a chance to reign high on the popularity totem pole.
Serious kudos to the work Mint does, but it's really just a re-packaged Ubuntu with some minor changes. If users want to run to that because they're naive enough to not realize they can install a secondary desktop environment in Ubuntu with a matter of 3 clicks, have at it. I find it downright laughable when someone says I'm leaving Ubuntu due to Unity. Okay, well, Gnome 2 is dead, so what are you running to? A customized variant of Gnome 3 in Mint? Gnome Shell in Fedora 16? KDE? LXDE? Things that are already easily installable in Ubuntu to begin with? *shrug*
The more time that passes, the more I am really enjoying both Unity and Gnome Shell. I'm still a little uneasy about Unity. It's far more beautiful and usable in 11.10 than it was in 11.04, but I still find some things in it lacking that Gnome Shell picks up on. I wish that Canonical and Gnome could have worked together a bit better than they did. It's no secret that the Gnome developers can often times be, well, *******s. I can't blame Canonical for spinning off Unity on their own accord due to frustrations at the design table with the Gnome dev team, but even still I believe both desktop environments are solid and would be crazy-awesome if their forces would be combined. On the flip side, Unity and Gnome Shell in itself are proving to be really decent alternatives to one another, retaining a relationship no difference than say Gnome 2 vs KDE. I mean, we already have KDE, LXDE, XFCE, and countless others. Adding more to the mix only offers more choice to us Linux users. No complaints there!
