[gspencley]

I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.

The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.

[khedoros1]

I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.

Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...

My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).

[DemocracyFTW2]

I'm happy to report that I upgraded my Mint from the previous to the most recent version without any snags. I then discovered I was still on an older kernel version which required a little more research, but went without any difficulties. The second part is admittedly something that not-so technical people will have considerable difficulty in even realizing. But all in all I can say that Mint is a solid, stable, and usable system for experts and novices alike.

[dv35z]

Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...