Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff The latest update to Linux Mint is here, with expanded video file format support and a tweaked Cinnamon desktop. It's as cool and refreshing as ever. As usual 21.2 comes in three separate editions – Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, which very approximately equate to being best suited to high, medium, and low-end PCs. Cinnamon is the …
Been using mint as preferred laptop/home distribution for a while.
Is it still worthwhile now that there is an Ubuntu Cinnamon ?
Serious none sarcastic question - if Mint was just delayed Ubuntu with a nicer desktop, why don't I just use the newer Ubuntu with the same desktop ?
The best Linux desktop out there, hands down. IMHO this could be the Linux distro that topples Windows on the desktop and relegates it to the dustbin of history. I've noticed that more than half of Windows users have very limited usage scenarios (surfing the web, reading and writing emails, watching YouTube video's and Netflix, opening an Office document and printing it once in a while) and Mint is perfectly suited to support all of these, costs nothing and is vastly more secure than Windows (and no, not because nobody uses it).
Also, support is essentially unending. Compare with Windows where Microsoft forces you to move to a new version of Windows every few years. The older versions are quickly unsupported and leave you with hardware that's ripe for the recycle bin if it doesn't support the newer version. Installing Linux in essentially a life saver and prevents e-waste.
One of the things I really like about Mint is that after installing an update/upgrade/security patch I can still print
Lucky old you. I have a ThinkPad X220 running Mint XFCE which does absolutely everything I could want ... except print. It can see my wireless printer, it claims to have set up my printer but anything sent to it vanishes. That's a printer which works perfectly happily with a couple of Xubuntu machines.
Give LMDE a try. It's almost as painless as Linux Mint Mate, in my opinion. I use both, only because I wanted to see the difference. There was pretty much NO learning curve in LMDE for this Mint Mate user, even though LMDE installs with Cinnamon by default. You can always go to Mate if you wish.
"IMHO this could be the Linux distro that topples Windows on the desktop and relegates it to the dustbin of history."
Linux will never topple Windows on the desktop until it stops fragmenting, stops forking, it gets a commercial level of support from a well funded backer, and, lastly, it has Microsoft Office, more specifically, Outlook available for it, and there's also an argument to say not until Adobe products are available too.
Windows still has a big hold on the business desktop because of all their legacy apps and the corporate world's love of locking machines down and micro-managing them with AD. In the consumer market, the bestselling games are all for Windows or consoles and Nvidia graphics adapters are much better supported than they are in Linux.
And, of course, the Stockholm Syndrome is immensely powerful. It has to be. I got a document camera yesterday. There are three options to use if in the Debian/Devuan repository but i decided to fire up the dual boot laptop with W10 to try out the vendor's option.
Oh wow! I thought I'd put it through the monthly patch cycle last week but it turns out it hadn't finished. In addition to the hours spent last week it went through at least another half hour of spinning dots with no indication of what it was doing, spinning dots whilst configuring, counting up to 100%, going back to 0% and then counting up again cleaning up and finally displaying the login backdrop for a while before displaying the password prompt. There was, of course, another reboot in the middle of this. Why on Earth - how on Earth - do Windows users put up with this?
"Why on Earth - how on Earth - do Windows users put up with this?"
You know the answer, but for anyone who doesn't ... It's because over the years, they have been conditioned by Microsoft to think that this is the way computers are supposed to work. It's been a kind of frog boiling combined with telling the same lies over and over until people believe them.
I'd like to think that eventually some of them will notice, but I'm not holding my breath.
As Jake said -- They simply don't know better.
Windows updates (of all kind, not only Microsoft) are jarring when one is used to Linux. They take ages, you don't know what's going on, if it's still working, stalled or dead, you can only wait, a long time, and hope you'll eventually get your computer back in a working condition. It wasn't like that back in WinXP/Win7 times IIRC. It was still very cumbersome, but faster, and you usually knew what was going on. IIRC.
> They take ages, you don't know what's going on, if it's still working, stalled or dead, you can only wait, a long time, and hope you'll eventually get your computer back in a working condition.
And most frustratingly of all, they just rudely cut in when you’re trying to shut down your system in a hurry or boot it up quickly to check something. Nothing like shutting down your laptop because you have to board a flight or it’s almost out of battery charge, only to be told “Windows is updating. Do not turn off your computer. 1% done…”
Yes, I speak from experience.
And most frustratingly of all, they just rudely cut in when you’re trying to shut down your system in a hurry or boot it up quickly to check something. Nothing like shutting down your laptop because you have to board a flight or it’s almost out of battery charge, only to be told “Windows is updating. Do not turn off your computer. 1% done…”
The second time that happened, my Father deleted Windows from his laptop and installed Mint. He never used anything other than Mint and found that it was perfect for his personal "use case". After a while, when he'd leaned a bit more about it, he began proselytising, and installed Mint for all his friends, colleagues and acquaintances!
you say that, but Windows allows the users to log in, do their jobs and log off. It can be patched, nearly all interactions can be logged and its reasonably easy to administer.
Apple have been conditioning users just as long as MS have, why are they not dominating the desktop space?
I've been using Linux almost as long as Windows and flexible as it is, i don't want to provide that flexibility to end users, who just want to do their jobs.
MS may be the bad guys in some eyes, but actually the majority don't care. And Anyway, ChromeOS is the biggest Lunix distro out there.
Linux will have a difficult time conquering the business desktop, but the HOME desktop should be altogether a possibility. Microsoft may not even care that much if Linux Mint takes over the consumer space, preferring to sell cloud desktops to businesses instead.
I can imagine consumers aren't dying to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for their computer, which they then don't even own.
> I can imagine consumers aren't dying to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for their computer
Since most computers come with Windows preinstalled (and require Windows for their (obligatory) firmware updates), this is a moot point. People will pay for some form of Windows, nobody asks if they need or want it.
This is not a dogma in itself. If the uptake of Linux Mint passes a certain threshold PC manufacturers may well pre-install it instead of Windows.
Considering Microsoft's more and more ominous policies (Microsoft account needed to run your PC, telemetry that cannot be turned off, ads in the Start Menu, pushing consumers towards a Cloud desktop) I see a time coming when the straw finally breaks the camel's back and consumers jump ship.
Again if the uptake is sufficient manufacturers could easily support updating firmware from Linux.
> If the uptake of Linux Mint passes a certain threshold PC manufacturers may well pre-install it instead of Windows.
Unfortunately there is no money to be made doing this. I'm afraid geeks & nerds aren't a big enough market, most normal people will want Windows anyway. Besides, Microsoft will pressure them to sell their OS, because no Windows, no money-making Office...
That's probably the time when the competition authorities step in.
This isn't relevant at this time, but believe me when Linux Mint's market share gets into the double digits this will surely crop up. As soon as PC manufacturers want to install it to save a few bucks and Microsoft threatens to charge them $150 (i.e. full price) for each Windows copy on all their machines they'll get a pat on the back from the FTC that they want a word with them.
> believe me when Linux Mint's market share gets into the double digits
I'm afraid I won't be here anymore... Don't get me wrong, I love Mint, I suggest it to everybody who loathes the inconsistency, arrogance and bloat of Win10/11, but from what I've seen only computer geeks will actually try it. This website here is an echo chamber so opinions here don't really count: Out there in the real world people are afraid of the unknown and big supporters of "I've always done it that way", so they will keep using Windows no matter what it does to them. At most they will switch to Apple, given its very active proselytism and its aura of being "for the cool & wealthy".
Linux is scary, people expect it to be like it was indeed some 20 years ago, obscure command lines you simply have to know. Even when they see Mint running, they don't trust it, they expect it requires some geeky insider knowledge to run it...
True, but only up to a point. In my, anecdotal, experience most people will quite happily sit down and get on with Mint/MX Linux/... as long as no one makes a big deal about 'CHANGE!!!'.
With a very little amount of initial handholding, and the odd bit of help and encouragement along the way, the people in my experience, with little to zero IT confidence, have all just got on with it, but this is all in private life.
Big institutions with their sub-cultures, paranoia, cynicism, and general disillusionment generally find 'CHANGE!!!' exactly that—something to be distrusted and avoided at all costs.
"Since most computers come with Windows preinstalled"
From what I can see Office, at least for consumers, is now subscription unless you have an old copy or buy what seems to be a grey-market Office 2001 with the regular buy-once office horrendously priced.
At what point does Windows also become subscription if you want features such as security updates?
My friends who run W10 now use LibreOffice or one of the other free office suites. Consumer moves in this direction mean that MS are only going to make money out of the original sale and the only way they can correct this, from their PoV, will be to move Windows to subscription.
"(and require Windows for their (obligatory) firmware updates)"
How many home users do you know who install firmware updates?
> How many home users do you know who install firmware updates?
The painful reality is that some PCs are slapped together out of whatever junk happened to be cheap at that time and include a buggy BIOS which will only boot the preinstalled Windows. For these cases, flashing a new firmware image can be the only way to get a non-Windows system up and running.
Fortunately this seems to be less common now than it used to be.
-A.
Most PCs, like the Dell XPS (13) 9310 laptop I am now using, have the ability to update system firmware from within the UEFI setup. This laptop came with Ubuntu preinstalled and has never been polluted with Windows... but for those rare times it is needed, like to update the firmware of the various components (not the unit itself), there's Win2USB.
I'm glad the web order form at Dell asked if I needed or wanted Windows.
I've been in the industry for about half a century. I have worked on any & all hardware, and any & all operating systems, and any & all applications. I have NEVER, not once, ever, been able to get help from Microsoft. Gawd/ess knows I've tried occasionally, I probably have well over a hundred fifty phone hours with them, but they have NEVER been helpful ... Mind you, my issues have been a trifle more complicated than "how do I print" or "I just downloaded pR0n^Wa picture, how do I view it?" ... By way of reference, I can even still get useful real-time telephone support for DEC gear running TOPS-10, but Microsoft? Faggedaboudit.
Now ask me why I no longer work on anything from Redmond.
"Linux will never topple Windows on the desktop until it stops fragmenting, stops forking, it gets a commercial level of support from a well funded backer, and, lastly, it has Microsoft Office, more specifically, Outlook available for it, and there's also an argument to say not until Adobe products are available too"
I will defend your right to keep on using Windows although in my case I completely converted over to Linux. The best thing is that system maintenance has gone down by a magnitude. Anyway, I use the paid Softmaker Office plus the free online version of MS Office online to get complete MS compatibility (FreeOffice, OnlyOffice & WPS Office can also be tried out).
There are well over a dozen email clients to try out and the alternativeto.net site is a good place to start finding them and trying them out.
"Installing Linux in essentially a life saver and prevents e-waste."
This, in spades!
I have an ancient (probably 15 year-old) Acer laptop which happens to have been equipped with a 64-bit dual-core processor. I ran XP on it until that was no longer even remotely feasible. Then I installed Mint, have gone through 2 version upgrades since, and it's still going strong today. Even with the HDD and relatively limited (4 GB) RAM, its performance is quite acceptable as a second machine for playing around on. My antediluvian HP printers (a laser and an inkjet) are supported just as well as my modern router. As someone else pointed out below: yes, it does take a long time to boot from cold -- but waking it up from sleep to ready is almost as fast as my year-old Acer Predator running under W10. Amazing!
And the version name: Vict-o-o-o-ria! Vict-o-o-o-ria! Victoria, Victoria!
You can add a SSD for $25 and I guarantee you it will boot just as snappy as a modern SSD-equiped Windows machine.
I added a $100 1GB Samsung SATA SSD to my 12 year old Intel Core i7-2600 desktop running Linux Mint and its performance is comparable to that of any modern machine.
Some of us want to use APPLICATIONS! Yup.....a pretty desktop is ....well.....pretty! But it makes no difference at all if the box is being used to write code, or compile code.....or browse Stack Overflow!!!
With that said, XFCE might get plaudits for being light on resource consumption..............but here at Linux Mansions it gets LOTS more plus points for:
(a) Being VERY LIKE Gnome2
(b) Being VERY UNLIKE Gnome3 and Gnome4
Just saying!!
My only complaint with xfce (at least on previous mint) is that the file manager seems to only do one thing at a time. If you do a drag and drop of a big bunch of files, it freezes on browsing any other folders until that finishes. This is on a reasonable (by 10year old standards) i7 box
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I also have an i7 laptop 10 years old (and a similarly aged workstation). I use the TrinityDesktopEnvironment fork of KDE3.5 (on Devuan as it happens), and its' file manipulation is 'a breeze'.
They still have a Windows 7 partition 'on the metal', which OF COURSE Microsoft have kindly de-activated for me.
In defense of the Xfce developers, they chose GTK+ back when it was a safe choice. And the Xfce devs have been mulling over what to do now that GTK+ is no longer safe. As for us end users, I plan to keep with Xfce for as long as it continues to work great. But if I were a choosing a DE today, yes, I'd start with non-GTK+ DEs.
I used XFCE for a few years because KDE became too bloated and Gnome 3 was, well, Gnome 3. But these days I prefer Cinnamon, for exactly the same reasons as people like XFCE. It's light on resources, familiarly old-school yet modern enough, and isn't Gnome or Unity.
I tried to upgrade my Lenovo laptop to Mint 21 a couple of weeks ago, but afterwards I had weird graphical glitches and Firefox would periodically freeze to then start working again 30 seconds later. So had to use Timeshift to restore a backup of 20.3, which i'm back using for now and is stable and as it is still in support for a while yet so there is no rush to try and upgrade again.
Booting from a USB stick with a Live distro of Mint 21.1 before I tried upgrading on the same laptop didn't show any of the problems I had after going down the upgrade route, so it was clearly something that borked during the upgrade process. So I think might just do a clean install rather than an upgrade.
Funny you should mention that. I installed LM 21.2 on an 8th-gen Intel NUC last night for use as a Jellyfin server, and found that 75% of the time the Wifi adapter wasn’t found. Now, support for Intel wifi adapters is pretty darn good in Mint (and Linux in general) so I’m puzzled. I might suspect a faulty adapter, but before I installed Mint I had to slap a temporary copy of Windows 10 on the same box in order to do some BIOS updates, and the Wifi worked perfectly under that OS.
Hmmm.
I’m not going to lose sleep over it because the NUC in question will be hard-wired via Ethernet once I move it from staging into “production” but it’s an oddity.
Other than that, 21.2 looks really slick and well-polished.
upvote for Linux mint mate here
It just............. works...
Whats more it works without all the faff and pain of my windows 10 machine even on the old HP wireless prunter I use.
Only real gripe is how long it takes to boot..... although thats more to do with the HDD being old and slow, rather than getting 2 256gig SSDs and using them in raid 0 mode (must remember to do that)
I compromised, I have /usr mounted on a 64GB SSD (it's a few years old now) and everything else on a big spinny disk. The other thing I discovered is that a lot of modern HDDs use SMR encoding and last time I changed disk and ended up with one of those, things got noticeably slower. This weekend I dumped that disk for a CMR type and things are suddenly a lot faster again. CMR costs more but not that much.
for those who've not met the acronyms yet: Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives write data on a hard disk in tracks that do not overlap. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows tracks to overlap, which results in higher data densities, but slower read and write times compared to CMR drives.
You don't want SMR drives in your NAS box or on servers.
Because I want to Just Work. Email customers (Tbird), write code (Sublime), browse the interwebs for code I can use [1] (Firefox + noscript most of the time, Chromium for buying stuff cos you just *know* that something won't work). Occasional LibreOffice to create docs. And finally openvpn / Remmina to get me onto a customer's VPN / Windows machine where I launch PuTTY which sets up a bunch of tunnels so I can get on their (Ubuntu) servers. Total exposure time to Windows, about thirty seconds.
get-iplayer to download dog-walking radio.
In all these things Mint Just Works.
[1] I mean, nobody actually writes code these days, do they? Obvs., if it sucks I don't use it. That's my added value.
Before anyone jumps in to say that that's not what most users do with home PCs let me add that my Linux usage is totally different:
Mostly local history and a bit of family history research. It includes preparing out-of-print books from our local history group as PDFs to make available online.
Throw in preparing the weekly handout PDFs for my wife's needlework class.
Writing - LibreOffice of course.
Talks - LibreOffice again.
Graphics & maps - Gimp, Pinta, KolourPaint & Gwenview (must try to get more into Inkscape & Krita).
Diagrams - Dia.
Then there are handy commandline tools such as ocrmypdf and pdfunite.
I use Blender daily on Mint and it works fantastically well. Nvidia driver issues are a, well, absolute non-issue.
I run Bottles so that I can run a couple of Windows apps when needed.
Emacs for text editing, darktable, Raw Theraee for raw image editing, Da Vinci Resolve for video editing, etc etc etc.
What's not to like?
Mint is the distro that converted Linux to a daily drive for me, I was an early user of Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse etc. and never quite 'got there' with them, despite having been a Unix admin in a previous life.
I'm glad to see they've not so far succumbed to the money grubbing and/or surveillance tactics of some others
I am sort-of concerned that their domain is "linuxmint.COM."
I wonder if the company or organization behind it will eventually allow itself to be bought for a couple of billion $ if the uptake starts to become noticeable. Microsoft has also been known to use proxies to invest in competitors, subsequently shutting them down.
I like Mint, been using it for quite a few years now. A bit of a hiccup when they dropped KDE support, but now I just install the XFCE version and then add KDE on top for desktop machines (laptops I tend to leave with XFCE). Takes a bit longer, but still pretty painless. I just did a clean install onto a new hard disk this weekend on one machine, and managed to copy most of the settings from the old disk.
I think the only quibble I have with the installer is that it won't let me easily do custom LVM partitions - I can have a clean install with two, but the custom partition option didn't seem to have a way of building up LVM so I had to do it manually in a terminal window and then run the installer.
I have been a user, through all the versions of Linux Mint, since the end of Windows 7 support so many years ago now. All I can say to someone coming over to the Linux world, from the god-awful Windows Operating system, Linux Mint is the one OS you should install. I was a Windows 7 user and Linux Mint gave me everything I needed, either it came with the installation or I got it from the Software Manager I shot and edited a fair amount of videos, did some word Processing, and played a few simple games. Linux Mint does everything I need it to do
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