KDE and GNOME get the most attention and funding as the big TWO DEs...

that never happened, outside of greasy redditors and 4channers, Ubuntu and Mint are king for normies and people who wants to get the job done

I really don’t know. But when they were a new distro it made sense… now that they’re one of the most adopted distros it doesn’t make so much sense

because Ubuntu is the default distro and actually it's better than Debian
t. used Debian in the past

Tbh they should just make it an independent distro like solus.

What would they even do to make Cinnamon newer? It is already feature complete as it is, I'm not sure I understand the problem. If it ain't broke, dont fix it. Cinnamon is generally a snappier desktop environment these days and they put out a new stock theme a couple of years ago. Thats really all that needs to be done for a feature complete software outside of patches.
What? It makes complete sense to me. Ubuntu is the most popular distribution (on desktop), has the most native software packaging support for Linux (however this started with debian being popular first before ubuntu came out to be fair), is backed by and developed by a corporation (Canonical), and has the largest community for support questions (askubuntu). They can get most of these benefits from normal upstream Debian but they can't get the last two, which are both desirable things, and Ubuntu's stable branch packages are much newer than Debian's. Of course Mint Team wants to base themselves on Ubuntu and not Debian, basing yourself on the easiest and most widely-supported distribution for the desktop is the best decision you could make if youre making a "just works" distro like Mint, not to mention it alleviates a lot of work on their end because 99% of their job is done by already done by Canonical and Mint just pulls it downstream (and it also gets all that community help and support on askubuntu and omg!ubuntu and shit downstream from ubuntu too as I mentioned). This allows them more room to work on what they actually work on, which is removing Canonical's influence from their downstream (mainly snaps) and developing Cinnamon.

If you really want to see Mint based on Debian go look up LMDE, it already exists and is a side-project of theirs. Its a mess.

Not unless they fix the blatant performance issues and start supporting a wayland session.
For fucks sake, I was using cinnamon today and elder scrolls online ran with constant performance issues, while on GNONE with the same settings and playing a 1080p memetube video runs perfectly fine on my RX 580.

>But lately Cinnamon has been getting some attention and development and it has Mint team backing it, do you think someday we will see it among the two or it will be forever KDE vs GNOME?
Budgie managed to survive by creating the buddies of budgie group.
Cinnamon could do something similar i guess.
In general if you notice all big or long lasting desktops have groups

best support really.

Your trans Rust programming discord server isn't "most people," Lilith.

Cinnamon is fundamentally Mint-centric. You can use it on other distros, but you won't get the same level of quality control. I feel like the kind of person who would really like Cinnamon is also the kind of person who would rather just use Mint than go out of their way to install it on something else.
As for GNOME and KDE's dominance, I see very little reason for change. Maybe when KDE 6 comes out and it's a buggy unusable piece of shit, or when GNOME 50 comes out and deprecates multitasking, people will start looking at alternatives, but for now the scene is pretty stable.

>Not unless they fix the blatant performance issues
These performance issues you speak of were backported from GNOME since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME (specifically version 3.38 in its last major release, which is pretty old now), GNOME has fixed these issues since but Cinnamon develops at a slower pace to that of GNOME so it does not have these fixes yet. There is a new LTS release of Mint coming out this month and it comes with a new version of Cinnamon based on GNOME 42, so it too will have an upgrade in performance soon too the same way GNOME did when it hit 40.
>and start supporting a wayland session.
They have no plans for this because Wayland is still buggy crap. Last I used Wayland (2 months ago) I still couldn't launch certain games I had (like Huniepop 2), but I could the moment I switched back to X11. X11 may be abandonware and objectively terrible but it still works on every machine it runs on, unlike Wayland, so Mint plans to stick with X until Wayland is more viable.
>For fucks sake, I was using cinnamon today and elder scrolls online ran with constant performance issues, while on GNONE with the same settings and playing a 1080p memetube video runs perfectly fine on my RX 580.
Wait until Mint 21 in two weeks.

People don't need an epic wheel reinvention every two years on their desktop workflow. Muscle memory is a thing. If working on the backend side of things is necessary, that's another matter, but if it looks identical for years is irrelevant for pretty much anyone but trend chasers and zoomers.

>Most people did [thing that doesn't make sense]
If you said Manjaro, it would be plausible at least.

I don’t like Mont’s management. The 2014ish mint I was amazed by has stagnated. Lots of issues in security and bloat.

Just embrace the canonical relationship and have a better product as Ubuntu Mint. Or don’t, but I wish mint team would step up their game