As the article notes, the increase seems to be driven mainly by users in Asia, where recycling and reusing older hardware is quite common. I wonder if third-party companies are offering extended security patches there, which could make affordable second-hand Windows 7 machines more appealing for people who just need them for browsing or light tasks. It would certainly make sense given recent fiascos and Microsoft’s current stance on AI, especially with generative AI being used to develop system-level code.
Ubuntu was created as supposedly the first Linux “made for people” of course there were other version of Linux trying to do that but Ubuntu also had funding, including for advertising (it was created by a billionaire Mark Shuttleworth) which helped.
Mint took Ubuntu and shaped it further to be even simpler.
I think Ubuntu tried to replicate UI of MacOS while Mint tried to look more like Windows.
I personally did not use Mint, but from the comments you can see that it has a significant following.
I used Ubuntu for some time, but stopped over decade ago as I got very frustrated that they frequently introduced instability (note that since Mint is based on Ubuntu it is not completely immune to that), though I hope that things improved and now Ubuntu is more stable.
I’ve found Mint to be more stable compared to my Ubuntu installations because the Mint team doesn’t include the fluff and bad design decisions when making releases.
(Like never requiring snap)