Linux Mint 19.1: A sneaky popular distro skips upheaval, offers small upgrades

While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw a very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.

While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn’t anyone’s top pick for “the cloud”, it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I’ll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.

There’s a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn’t “changing the desktop computer paradigm”, or “innovating” in “groundbreaking” ways. It’s just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you’ve used, which is to say you’ll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.

It’s worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you’re happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven’t tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you’re dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.

The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint’s main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn’t work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it’s not officially supported by Linux Mint.

Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It’s been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn’t seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.

That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed “Tessa”, Cinnamon has an optional new “modern” look.

[image=”linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg” caption=”Cinnamon 4.0’s new look in Linux Mint 19.1”]

Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you’ll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.

The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.

[image=”linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg” caption=”Cinnamon 4.0’s old look in Linux Mint 19.1 — that familiar look is just a click away.”]

I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled “First Steps” and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it’s emblematic of Linux Mint’s approach to change — give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new “modern” theme better.

[image=”linuxmint191-welcome.jpg” caption=”Linux Mint’s very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine.”]

As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I’d argue that’s a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don’t have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I’ve used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I’m used to, particularly dragging windows around.

Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There’s a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it — so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.

Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint’s Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.

Mint’s Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint’s Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.

Linux Mint’s Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you’d have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately — certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.

To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):

[image=”linuxmint191-contast.png” caption=”Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint).”] .

Linux Mint MATE Edition

It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that’s still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there’s an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE.

[image=”linuxmint191-mate.jpg” caption=”The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”]

The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).

One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the “First Steps” section of Mint’s welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.

While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It’s that good.

The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint’s built-in backup tool. It’s prominently featured at the top of the “First Steps” section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It’s dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you’ve got your backup location set, just click okay and you’re done.

[image=”linuxmint191-backups.jpg” caption=”Linux Mint’s helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift.”]

If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It’s been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don’t discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.

Linux Mint Xfce Edition

I’ll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level — for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes — are part of the Xfce release as well.

[image=”linuxmint191-xfce.jpg” caption=”The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”]

Outside of Mint’s tools though there’s not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that’s still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you’ll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.

Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it’s relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there’s really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).

Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a Patreon page to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint’s Timeshift project.

It’s also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it’s really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I’m not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.