Yes, with Mandriva. I had just switched from 98 to Xp and was like “No, no, no, this sucks!”.

Mandriva looked so nice in comparison. But no internet, it just wouldn’t connect and I didn’t know how to troubleshoot it.

With how reliable and useless AI is, it would probably just rename the file with .png on the end.

Mint didn’t really see any sort of popularity until around 2010 as I remember.

I’m aware it’s initial release was earlier (surprised it was exist in 06!), but the reality of those times is that Ubuntu was still building itself up let alone Mint getting traction yet.

Ubuntu, Knoppix and MEPIS? I first used Ubuntu in 2006, but it was still very immature then. I didn’t really know much about any other Debian derivatives.

The other big one that was popular was Mandrake but that was rpm based, and a bit later PClinuxOS which was Mandrake based. I didn’t think Debian derivatives were much of a thing then aside from Ubuntu.