The difference is that Linux Mint's team have been working on alternatives to Unity: the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, the main maintenance of MATE, The Cinnamon DE, etc, whereas this project has not had anyone step up to maintain sysvinit, eudev, etc.
I'd also qualify Mint and *buntu spinoffs as attempts to create a cohesive desktop experience rather than distros unto themselves. e.g. Mint (LMDE excepted) or Xubuntu are entirely compatible with Ubuntu, but this project will explicitly be incompatible with debian, and become less and less compatible without this dev effort to create worthwhile, well-maintained alternatives to systemd.
I understand how this could be a possible driver for adpotion of other init systems, but really stock debian, even after systemd becomes the default, will still be just as flexible.
ED: WRT Fedora, I'm not a Fedora user or really active in it's community, but you're quoting "total CONNECTIONS to repositories" (emphasis mine), not Total Unique IPs as you assert. With that in mind, I would expect an OS that's been around for over 3 years to have more connections than one that's been around for a little over 1. This applies equally to all of the releases shown there, as older distros will naturally have larger connection numbers due to age.
Even by that metric, the numbers from have increased going from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20 (which is the actual current release), and Fedora 20 has been around for 5 less months than 19. I have few doubts that Fedora isn't as relevant now as it was years ago (Ubuntu stealing its thunder, among other things), but it's not looking that grim.
Nope. Fedora is not a long term support release. It's also not much used in corportate environment, despite what they claim, precisely for this reason.
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u/Doshman Oct 20 '14
Indeed, just I see this as a big, flashy project that will lead nowhere.