What's in Santa's sack? New Linux Mint, EndeavourOS and postmarketOS updates

The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it's not the only new distro for Yule. Mint 21 arrived back in August as the Franco-Irish project's take on Ubuntu "Jammy". Way back in the old days, Mint did not take too kindly to …

[nematoad]

EndeavourOS looks good to me.

Do you know what. I'm tempted to take a look at EndeavourOS just for the spelling!

And as an added bonus it gives you a way to avoid systemd.

What's not to like?

[a pressbutton]

Re: EndeavourOS looks good to me.

special feature - you log in by completing a crossword

[Erik H]

Re: EndeavourOS looks good to me.

And on login you are greeted by classical music.

[botfap]

Mint 21.1

Just upgraded my laptop to Mint 21.1 this morning. Ill give it a couple of weeks before I do the workstation upgrade just to be on the safe side. No problems and everything went smoothly, but my god, the new default theme and colour scheme is ugly. Its like the old Redhat 7/8 theme from 2000-2002. I dont know why Mint have switched away from the distinctive green themes to something so bland, generic and blue

Everything works well though. The desktop is a little more responsive on the cinnamon version and the new animations are much more subtle. Was only a 30 second job to install the mint legacy themes and papirus icons and its backing to looking good too

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Mint 21.1

I'll probably be checking it in the next day or three; I have a problem using STM's CubeIDE with the last version; something to do with 32 bit libraries according to the wisdom of the net but adding those libraries didn't fix. Don't know whether the issue is with STM or Mint at this point; I haven't investigated in detail as my main dev laptop uses a previous version which does work.

[botfap]

Re: Mint 21.1

Just tested CubeIDE on 21.1 and it works fine here. I installed CubeIDE on Mint 20 and its still fine after upgrading. A cheat way of setting up the 32 bit multiarch and libs on Mint or Ubuntu is to just install "apt install steam", that will setup multiarch for i386 and install all the base libs

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Mint 21.1

Worked fine for me (last version) until I tried to connect to a Nucleo. Then it complained :( The IDE itself works fine, but if I can't actually send code to and debug a target, it's not really useful.

Thanks for the test!

[Liam Proven]

Re: Mint 21.1

[Author here]

> my god, the new default theme and colour scheme is ugly.

TBH I don't care much either way myself, but one of the comments to my brief look at the beta was:

«

Hallelujah! The all-gray-on-black theme was not only ugly, but made it also much harder to spot things for my old eyes

»

Verily is it said, "you can't please all of the people all of the time."

[botfap]

Re: Mint 21.1

Im in the same boat, old eyes that need decent contrast. Modern themes are all too uniformly dark or light for me, I want something in between

I agree, the Mint default, medium grey on dark grey is hideous. The new themes (from 20.2) give me eyestrain on the light themes and take me too much effort to pick out individual elements on the dark themes. Same is true in Gnome 3 and KDE 5, though KDE is a bit better in that regard

I always end up using the mint-legacy-themes and papirus icons as they are a nice blend of dark and light and my eyes can pick out the elements immediately so I end up with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFcHtWMOxJA

[Montreal Sean]

Re: Mint 21.1

@botfap

Thanks for the video, I'd forgotten how much I liked that look.

I may need to reconfigure my Mint appearance tonight.

[MacroRodent]

Re: Mint 21.1

Browsing the "New Features" page of the XFCE edition, there was talk of getting the old colours back with the "Mint-Y-Legacy" theme. (Not tried yet, downloaded it last night).

[ThatOne]

Re: Mint 21.1

> getting the old colours back with the "Mint-Y-Legacy" theme

That's what I ended up using... *grin*

I don't care about the fat triangular cursor either. It's just that for the last 20 years all my mouse cursors have had the same distinctive shape and color, so having all of a sudden some kind of black triangle on your screen is distracting. My screen is not an art gallery.

_{Yes, yes, I know. Get off my lawn already...}