It used to be a beautiful, friendly shade of brown and orange, and now it’s a vile shade of purple.

Other than that, if you look at Linux Mint today, you get a rough idea of what it was like. An easy to use desktop, with menus and settings exactly where you’d expect them. It was relatively easy to install, with an easy to understand graphical menu guiding you through the process. It had sane defaults for everything. It was fast, stable and improving all the time. Most things just worked. It was fast and reliable compared to Windows XP/Vista.

Slightly “Rose Tinted Glasses” view of things, but essentially their slogan “Linux for Humans” was true. An inexperienced computer user or previous Windows user could pick it up and use it straight away. There was quite a lot of innovation towards user experience, in line with community wants, hopes and ideas. It was all about customising things to your own needs.

The change was essentially they innovated towards their own ideas and not those of the community. It was all about customising things to their idea of what things should be like.

They designed their own Unity desktop to replace Gnome, changed to a more obtuse “Mac-like” interface, removing menus, settings, options etc. They were trying for this cool “convergent” OS for seamless mobile phone and computer usage. This made a lot of compromises in desktop usability. They eventually binned the mobile phone thing and Unity, then tried to remake everything again in Gnome, but left all the weird defaults and missing options.

Then a few other things in a similar direction.

Then Snaps, but that’s its own story.

My two cents - change in priorities over the years

It started as almost a pet project funded by Mark Shuttleworth to make Linux easier to use, and was focused on desktop Linux

Over the years, the focus changed to becoming profitable, and their main focus now is the server and IoT space