The recent commotion about Ubuntu being displaced in popularity by Mint is a distraction from what’s really happening. No longer is Ubuntu a default choice. In fact, if you look at the 7 day scores, Ubuntu and Mint, together, are less than the next most popular 8 distros:
| rank | distro | Hits per day |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mint | 7909 |
| 2 | Ubuntu | 2075 |
| 3 | openSUSE | 1980 |
| 4 | Fedora | 1715 |
| 5 | Debian | 1616 |
| 6 | Mageia | 1475 |
| 7 | Arch | 1410 |
| 8 | ZevenOS | 1309 |
| 9 | Vector | 1185 |
| 10 | Puppy | 1043 |
There is obviously a huge installed base of GNU/Linux out there and this dance is a minor twitch in the reality. It does indicate a vibrant ecosystem with choice as a distinguishing feature compared to Wintel.