yeah it worked for most people back then as well, not well as today, and it has been my to tool for audio before the 1.0 release they fixed a lot of issues, and part of the Linux DE Stack had to make a lot of changes as well, the core for Linux Mint is older then 2 years.
Fedora is a Developers OS after all, it would need to pull stuff like that in before most do.
it really is and i been liking green Debian as well.