Yep. The whole quibble over the validity of DistroWatch got me motivated to search for something a little bit better; as it turns out, Wikimedia kindly publishes aggregate stats reports of traffic through its Squid proxies at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera...

I hand-plotted a few months' of data before deciding it wasn't necessary to go further: from August 2012 to October 2012, Wikimedia saw an increase of 1.1 billion page requests from Linux operating systems (a 10% growth for Linux in that time period); of those, Ubuntu gained 230 million page requests while Mint remained steady at 11 million page requests during that period.

Just to be clear, I would have liked the story that Ubuntu users were flocking to Mint, but that appears to be a fiction at this point.

Except that it does:

http://distrowatch.com/

From distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

except that it doesn't. it's a pissing contest based on clicking links.

I guess that makes Google Adwords totally irrelevant then.

I've clicked on Distrowatch's Mint entry several times to see what all the fuss is about.

I still run Ubuntu.