2011 has been a great year for the Linux Mint¹ team.

With the advent of Gnome 3 and introduction of Unity in it’s parent distro, many people speculated which of these two would the Mint team adopt. With a great surprise the team came up something beyond. Taking advantage of the Gnome Shell extensions facility, the Mint team introduced a sleek panel that resembles Gnome 2, enabled desktop icons by default and added the shutdown option. Mint once again proved to be the distribution that is closest to users’ needs.

The release of Linux Mint 12 in combination with an ‘ease of use’ desktop, had many Linux users flocked to grab a copy of this awesome distribution. During the early days of the release, the Mint website experienced a rise in traffic and to no one’s surprise Mint climbed the Distrowatch ladder taking the No. 1 position.