Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

I agree that creating a boutique distribution in order to circumvent disputes with the Gnome devs over the direction of their software is a waste of resources (ie: time/money/etc), but this isn't a completely irrational decision.

Regardless of what you think about package managers the fact that it's extremely common to create various 'spins' or 'flavors' of this or that Linux distribution should be telling of a fundamental problem with lack of flexibility with Linux systems.

It's a bit of a confusing problem, of course.

The deal is with most operating systems the operating system itself does not promise the ability to support multiple desktop environments. Windows does not support anything beyond a 'classic' theme'd interface versus a new one. It doesn't have 30 different flavors of desktop, even though it's very possible to that in Windows. Similar thing with OS X. This means that Linux distributions have created a significantly higher level of complexity for themselves versus those from other operating systems.

With Linux the distributions promise the ability to let you install whatever desktop environment you want, but they fail to deliver it in a way that is easy for users to deal with. For most users it's easier to install a entire new linux operating system then it is to (say) try out Gnome and then install KDE and try that.

Why do I know this? Because it's exactly what users choose to do. It's just a question of figuring out _why_ this happens.

And it's even deeper then that...

A major part of the 'cinnamon' vs 'mate' vs 'gnome 2' vs 'gnome 3' is that the Gnome devs made it the unfortunate choice of making Gnome 2 and mutually Gnome 3 exclusive. So it was a huge pain in the ass for users to try out Gnome 3 and then go back to Gnome 2 when they realized it was not mature enough for their purposes.

Why did Gnome decide to do this? Well... the general inability for Linux distributions to make it easy to manage software installations and switch environments is a major cause of this.