Distrowatch rankings are meaningless by their own admission. It is just
based on page hits which means simply that more people are curious about
Mint. It does not mean that they are downloading and installing Mint or
that Mint is more popular. Everybody knows about Ubuntu which translates
into little curiosity. Few Ubuntu users go to Distrowatch. They get the ISO
directly from Ubuntu. Any 12 year old can manipulate DW standings and we
need to be careful about giving them any credibility. A few years ago
PCLinuxOS said that it was ahead of Ubuntu. Now it is in 7th place. They
failed to deliver.

Any statistics by independent sources do not even rank Mint as near the
top. You have to remember that Ubuntu is fragmented among all of the
*buntus. Fedora is much closer to Ubuntu's numbers than Mint by real stats.
Mark Shuttleworth has said from their statistics Ubuntu 11.04
was their biggest release to date and a big increase over previous
releases. They do not see any drop off in downloads or in use. (11.10 is
too new to be included).

Mint needs to deliver. We do not need hype. People should not base their
distro choice on DW standings or popularity of any kind but on their needs.
Use what you like even if it is in last place.

What is happening is a separation between Mint and Ubuntu that will mean
they will have to develop their own community. For a long time they have
been able to join with Ubuntu users, but with Lisa, Mint will be based on
GNOME 3 and not use Compiz and have little in common with Ubuntu. The
things that they will want to know won't be in Ubuntu forums and vice
versa. That will be interestig to see how it sorts itself out.