Mint 18.1 review: Forget about Wayland and get comfy with the command line

I knew it as soon as I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016—I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.

How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? There’s nothing like some guy on the Internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily [/sarcasm]. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year.

But I digress. There is a very simple reason I didn’t pick Mint as the best distro of 2016, and I didn’t even have to wait to test it: the reason is Wayland.

For better or worse, the Wayland graphics stack is the future of Linux and will undoubtedly be the big story of 2017 (unless the Mir display server actually ships, in which case it might share the spotlight). What’s more, once you’ve used Wayland in my experience, you’ll want it everywhere. Sadly, only one of the major distros has Wayland today: Fedora.

That doesn’t mean Mint 18.1, which happened to arrive the same day that our Fedora review published, isn’t a great release. But this new release doesn’t have Wayland. Nor will the distro at large have Wayland until Linux Mint’s upstream source, Ubuntu, ships Wayland as part of an LTS release. That likely won’t happen until at least 2018, when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir, and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland. And even then, it may not happen right away.

That means there’s no Wayland in Mint’s near future, and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward. That’s an interesting transition for the project given that it started out with a more aggressive development pace, adopting new features and iterating quickly compared to other Linux distros.

All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and built off the LTS cycle. Mint is no longer quite as cutting edge as it once was, which shows up in some important areas like the kernel (which is only at 4.4 even now). Mint is also still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users (especially inexperienced) users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro.

Although Mint 18.1 builds on the same set of base packages found in the previous release (Linux Mint 18.0), which are based on Ubuntu 16.04, there’s still plenty of new stuff in 18.1 to make Mint fans happy. Most of what’s new is not underlying system change; rather, it’s higher level stuff (the stuff that makes Mint, well, Mint). As always, Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will be releases with other desktops as well. The Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing, none of those are out yet.

Linux Mint Cinnamon edition

Cinnamon has long felt like the flagship desktop for Linux Mint, and this release is no exception. Though MATE gets roughly equal billing—and, from what I can tell as an outsider, equal development attention—Cinnamon is definitely the flashier, more polished of the two.

Linux Mint 18.1 features Cinnamon 3.2, which is notable for two things that sound rather minor at first glance but open up quite a few possibilities for third-party developers. The first is that all the various menus and panels no longer have what Mint calls “box pointers”—in other words, the shape of the menus used to “point” to their parent object. In Cinnamon 3.2, those are gone. Cinnamon 3.2 also features the ability to dock panels vertically on either (or both) sides of your screen rather than just the top and bottom.

The latter change is immediately useful for anyone working a cramped laptop screen since there’s more horizontal space than vertical, provided the panels on the side work with your habits. Eliminating the box pointers is something that will be interesting down the road since it opens up more options for theme designers.

Thanks to some underlying upgrades, Cinnamon 3.2 brings back some of its flash by re-enabling cross-fade animations and fade effects for lists. These features had both been disabled in the past couple of releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom sound when a notification pops up. To do so, there’s a new setting in the Sound panel of the System Settings app; head to “Sound” and then “Sound Effects” to find it.

There are also a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while but rarely get mentioned. To start, I’ve always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn’t exist. For example, I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but within Mint there’s no Xed app—it’s called “Text Editor.” Still, if you open the main menu and search for Xed, the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly, I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called “Desktop,” “Appearance,” or something else. What’s nice is I don’t have to remember—type “Desktop,” and the top hit is Background. It’s a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small yet common problems is a big part of why users love Mint.

Another very nice under-the-radar feature that’s new in Cinnamon 3.2 is that Bumblebee users can right-click any app in the application menu and launch it with optirun by selecting “Run with NVIDIA GPU.” That might be the easiest way I’ve seen to take advantage of the more powerful—but more battery-draining—graphics only when you really want them (e.g. with your favorite graphics editor or game). Again, it’s a very small feature, but it’s one that’s extremely useful.

Another bit of hardware support worth noting is that in addition to synaptics, Cinnamon 3.2 now supports the newer libinput touchpad driver. I’ve had much better luck with libinput on newer hardware, particularly getting “reverse” scrolling working globally as opposed to globally-except-Chromium (which is what happens if you use a higher level method, Xmodmap for instance, or synaptics). You mileage may vary, but either way, it’s nice to have the option to use libinput with Cinnamon.

Mint continues to polish its set of default applications with this release. The Xed text editor gets a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the windows that features find-as-you-type searching. Xed also now has full support for dark themes, notably the optional Mint-Y theme that shipped with Mint 18.0. Mint’s video and image viewer apps, Xplayer and Xviewer respectively, also see some improvements, like the ability to blank a second monitor when you’re watching a video in Xplayer.

The Mint Update Manager remains largely unchanged aside from a couple of tweaks to how kernel update options are displayed (they’re now sorted by version, and there are recommendations for both the most stable and the most secure). There’s also a new column showing the source of updates, whether it’s Mint, upstream Ubuntu, or any third-party repos you’ve installed.

While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place this distro falls on its face. Mint users tend to get defensive about this point because Mint has gone to the trouble to build its own Update Manager (which is very nice; I’ve praised it in the past, particularly for linking to the changelogs for every available kernel). But nice as it is, an update manager becomes counter productive if it doesn’t keep users up to date, particularly with kernel level security updates.

In Mint 18, Mint began including an intro screen that comes up when you first launch Update Manager. Mint will ask you which settings you want to use for updates. The options are “don’t break my computer,” “optimize stability and security,” and “always update everything.” By default, the middle option is selected. Each of those options has some additional information, including a recommendation which is, in the same order, “for novice users,” “for most users,” and “for advanced users.”

I didn’t call this out in the last review, but it deserves it. Frankly, this presentation is a load of crap.

Labeling a setting “don’t break my computer” implies that the other options will break your computer, which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That’s a huge disservice to novice users, and it’s out of place with the rest of Mint. If Mint really can’t provide a stable up-to-date system without blocking upstream updates, I would suggest everyone stop using it. The thing is, Mint can provide that, it has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users. This bit of overly clever language could cause a newer user to end up with a less secure system.

Again, Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages. And if the “always update everything” option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I’d suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about the distro. In my experience, though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint. It should be the default setting, just as it is in every other distro I’m aware of.

It’s worth noting that when I say “update the kernel,” I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1, that means kernel 4.4.x. This decision feels terribly out of date. It could be that I’ve spent too much time with Arch and have been using brand new hardware a lot, but I’d hesitate to use anything less than 4.8 at this point, particularly if you have a Skylake chip.

Fortunately, 4.8 is available for Mint, though here you may well want to heed Mint’s various scary-sounding warnings. Updating between kernel point releases can definitely cause problems with your system—especially if your distro hasn’t explicitly confirmed that everything works. As far as I can tell, Mint has not.

While Mint’s Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available, it’s frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings you get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? There seems to be no information provided to answer that question.

Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn’t used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system. Beyond linking to the changelogs (which is a nice feature), there’s no indication of what’s been tested and what hasn’t. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability, and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint.

Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to be the canary in a coal mine, I went ahead and updated the kernel to 4.8 and… nothing bad happened. For the record, I do the majority of my testing on a Lenovo x240 i5. I always start with a virtual machine install and then also install it on actual hardware using a separate partition from my main OS installation. In other words, I don’t have any hardware that’s likely to be affected by jumping a few kernel point releases. Your experience may be very different, and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before updating your kernel in Mint. And honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch.

MATE

Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but it has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It’s relatively lightweight, but it’s not militant about its minimalism. For older hardware, it makes a great option.

This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications, and policykit library are all GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout, and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE.

MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo, and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can, of course, be disabled in the preference.

MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section, plus one other change I did not mention up there: Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same too, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well.

If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well, you’re sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won’t be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I’ve found in MATE. If you’re looking for a desktop that just works and is easy on your processor, graphics, and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice.

Conclusion

Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? In a word, no.

Mint 18.1 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easier transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I’d still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you’re comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don’t care about security all that much, then it probably won’t bother you.

Likewise, MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint (particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin).

In the end, Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates, and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line.

One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre’s take regarding upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, so Lefebvre’s perspective is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are you sure you want to upgrade?

That might seem at odds with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it’s not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking that comes with risk (if it ain’t broke…). With that in mind, I would say moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021—and neither has Wayland.