I used Mint for a few years, before moving over to the Linux Mint Debian Edition, back when Ikey Doherty was still involved with it. When Ikey moved on to do SolusOS, I went with him. I have a Mint 14 'Nadia' Cinnamon partition on one machine, but I do prefer using SolusOS. I cut my Linux teeth on Ubuntu, but I find myself avoiding it like the plague, these days. And Mint just feels too close to Ubuntu for me. I get the impression Shuttleworth is wanting to steer everything toward the phone market and I'm not interested.
It looks like Schoelje is developing a following for SolydXK, which is based on LMDE, but I'm not a big KDE fan. And Xfce comes up short, after using Ikey's Consort Desktop for so long.
SolusOS 2 is getting real close to taking a big step forward. Ikey decided to get away from the Debian base and re-wrote SolusOS from the ground up. It will be using the PiSi package manager, the Athena GTK3 file manager and his own Consort desktop, which was based on components from GNOME 3.4.2, but provides a GNOME 2 'feel', all without requiring any hardware acceleration. I'm thinking we might be seeing an Alpha .iso spun up in the next ten days or so. I've never ventured far from Debian, so this will be a big change for me.
A distro that bears some watching is the all-new Cloverleaf. This is going to be based on openSUSE and is being developed by the remnants of the old Fuduntu team. I think these guys are going to have something pretty special, when it is all said and done.