
Until recently Ubuntu has done a great job of promoting Linux.
Now Ubuntu seems to have a goal to create the greátest possible distance between themselves and the rest of the Linux world.
Where Oracle RedHat and Novell are all working on Wayland with 10 thosands of developers Canonical has a mere 300 to implement Mir
KDE and Gnome are porting to Wayland so you might be stuck with Unity on Ubuntu in the future.
Canonical are asking for problems - and will get them; as we can se from the bugs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1063354
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1073433
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1124803
Here Canonical/Ubuntu could benefit from the work of others with both more manpower and more knowledge than Canonical posesses.
(Canonical has never been a major contributor to the Linux kernel - only a heavy user of it)
Once they are in that fish pond of their own, they will have to do most of it allone. So their tech people see that and shorten down the service length for all Ubuntu installations.
This might pull Mint down too and has made longterm Ubuntu users advise people to start looking for alternatives.
The popularity of Ubuntu did drop like a stone with Unity and it will continue to do even more so with Mir - unless they come up with something spectacular.
The question is simply if you want to build up a dependency towards Canonical /Ubuntu or if it makes more sence to trust the huge resources of all other Linux participants.
There are no dependencies there because they are all competing, but smart enough to see that common bugfixes improves all of them.
My money is on IBM RedHat Oracle Novell+++
So it looks like Ubuntu has lost it, and that it is time to look for an alternative.