I'm in Europe and even some non-tech know what a Linux Mint is. And a lot of newbies I help to install Linux on their laptops explicitly ask for it as well. Many are lost with Ubuntu/Unity interface and are much more happy with Cinnamon on Mint.

Mint 17 was vastly more compatible as a desktop VM than Ubuntu 14.04, so I definitely used it when I needed to test code with gcc 4.8.