On 2011-11-08 19:15:55 (+0400), Ilya Chernykh
Linux Mint developers claim 40% increase in user base in just one month due to Gnome 2 they provide in Linux Mint.
In a blog post, anyone can claim anything :)
=== In Linux Mint 11 we made the decision to keep Gnome 2.32. The traditional Gnome desktop, although it’s not actively developed by the Gnome development team anymore, is still by far the most popular desktop within the Linux community. As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market. === http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851
In Linux Mint 12 they include the Gnome2' s fork, Mate desktop as well as a set of plugins for Gnome Shell that reverses some changes made in the user interface by Gnome3 team, known as LMDE (Linux Mint Desktop Extensions). The taskbar, main menu, multi-window interface will be back again.
Let's see what their position will be on distrowatch when the security issues arise because there are only a handful people who support the fork (at least, I would presume it's not anywhere near as many developers as with Gnome 3).
The recent statistics from DistroWatch shows that recent days Mint got more than twice hits than Ubuntu http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=1 suggesting popular interest.
Indeed, "suggesting", as we all know that distrowatch is hardly an indicator of much (and I wouldn't pull the distrowatch card when openSUSE is on top either). Well good for them, if that's the case, as it will only be temporary: - all the Gnome developers are on Gnome3 now - their fork will require a lot of manpower to fix security issues and bugs, not sure that many of the Gnome2 developers are in that team (I might be wrong though) - Gnome3 will eventually become more featureful and as stable as Gnome2 Very similar situation to KDE4 vs KDE3/Trinity. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf