Review: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

The Linux Mint project recently unveiled Linux Mint 17.3. The latest release from this Ubuntu-based Linux distro just might be the best Linux desktop around.

Linux Mint 17.3 arrived a few days late and had a somewhat bumpy launch thanks to some server hardware issues that temporarily knocked the Linux Mint blog and forums offline. The final version of Linux Mint was out there, but few knew about it until a few weeks later.

This is a big release: Linux Mint 17.3 marks the final release that will be built atop Ubuntu 14.04 and marks the pinnacle of the project’s plan to stop chasing every Ubuntu release and focus on perfecting what makes Mint, well, Mint. When Ubuntu puts out its next Long Term Support release in April of 2016, Mint will have to upgrade its base system.

Mint’s LTS strategy was a risky move, as it bucked several trends by opting to pass on whatever butterflies Ubuntu was chasing. Sticking with a stable base and steadfastly refusing to inflate its version numbers may well have left some users at a loss. Jests aside, turning its back on the latest and greatest GTK and kernel updates that come from tracking Ubuntu’s every move is not without some costs, but overall the strategy seems to have been a huge success.

The developers of Linux Mint have shown that they have the vision and are willing to put in the actual work to produce one the best desktop experiences around. The Cinnamon edition is not just the most polished Linux desktop around, it’s possibly the most polished desktop period. Hyperbolic? Perhaps a little, but this really is the most thoroughly thought-out desktop I’ve ever used, Linux or otherwise.

Mint’s lead developer Clément Lefebvre and team have done a great job of keeping most of the userspace packages much more up-to-date than the Ubuntu 14.04 base would lead you to believe. There are exceptions—GNOME/GTK is probably the most noticeable, being stuck at 3.10, and the kernel also lags behind at version 3.19—but for the most part, the latest version of all the apps you’re likely to use are either available in the Mint repos or just a PPA away. And thanks to Mint’s amazing package management system, finding, installing, and keeping track of apps and even PPAs is surprisingly simple.

Linux Mint: Cinnamon Edition

If you don’t want to think about the OS you’re using—that is, if you want to click a button that says “Menu” to launch an app or open a folder named “Documents” to find your files—Cinnamon is going to make you happy.

Cinnamon is for people who want their desktop to get out of the way. It does not revolutionize any paradigms and it probably doesn’t work very well on that mythical Linux tablet that GNOME is still waiting for, but it does offer one of the best, most-polished experiences you can get on a laptop or desktop.

And by polish I don’t mean the theme looks nice—though it does, albeit not much different from the last few releases—I mean the functionality and workflow. Cinnamon has smoothed down the rough edges of common tasks you do everyday, like listening to music, browsing your files and applications, updating and installing software, and getting notifications from background applications. The things you do the most are the things Linux Mint wants to improve on, not by changing the way you do them, but by making them easier to do.

In this release that translates into a number of improvements in commonly used taskbar applets and tools like the sound applet, power applet, system tray, and Mint’s package management system.

Let’s start with the improved sound applet which resides in the far right side of the system tray by default.

It’s a small thing, but if you like listening to music while you work, you’ll probably interact with the sound applet all the time. In Linux Mint 17.3 the sound applet has been improved to add playback controls over the cover art, including a progress bar you can use to skip forward and back. There’s also a new right-click menu that gives you access to all the settings and adjustments you’re likely to ever need are right there in the pop-up window above the applet icon. If you have multiple output options, you can switch between them right in the applet. As of Mint 17.3 output devices now show both their name and their origin, which makes it easier to figure out which “HDMI Audio Controller” goes with which HDMI port, for example. The applet can also quickly switch between audio players—for example, pause Spotify and switch to your local player when you lose connectivity—or quit audio players without actually switching apps. You can also quickly mute both input and output.

In my testing I never encountered any music-related task that I couldn’t handle right from the applet—no need to open your music player or dive into the system settings. In fact, if you use the venerable Music Player Daemon to play your music, the applet is all you need to have running.

One final touch worth noting: by default the Cinnamon audio applet hides an audio application’s native system tray applet (if it has one). If you prefer, for instance, Spotify’s native applet, there’s an option in the sound preference pane to tell the sound applet to stop hiding other sound applets. GNOME developers take note: it’s possible to build something cool, accept that some people won’t like it, and then accommodate those people by giving them an option to turn it off. Strange that offering choices and options have become a Linux desktop feature that’s worth mentioning.

Another frequently used applet that sees a makeover in this release is the power applet, which —like the audio applet—offers more detail and control. Now you can quickly see the battery state not just for your laptop, but any attached devices like a wireless mouse or keyboard.

The rest of Cinnamon’s system tray has some improvements as well. The workspace switcher applet now shows a little visual representation of your workspaces, with little rectangles corresponding to each window inside of them. The icons are tiny, but it can be helpful if you have a lot of workspaces open.

Similarly helpful for quickly finding the window you want are the new thumbnails in the window list. This works just like its Windows equivalent: hover a tab in the task bar’s window list and you’ll get a little preview of that window. Again, it’s easy to turn this off in the window list applet preferences if you prefer the simpler tool tip look. Similar previews also show up in the Alt-Tab switcher if you pause between presses of the tab key.

Cinnamon’s Nemo file manager gets one noteworthy new feature that again, while small, simplifies another everyday task—renaming files. Nemo’s new “quick rename” feature allows you to rename files with a “slow” double-click. You’ll have to turn it on in the Nemo preferences (under the Behavior tab), but it makes it far easier to quickly rename things (it’d be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using “enter” rather than return to trigger it).

Cinnamon’s already-excellent support for HiDPI screens has been further improved, particularly if you connect to a HiDPI TV over HDMI. There are also improvements for HiDPI support in the login screen, including a fix for a bug that would sometimes cause the login screen to be very small. Instead of simply doubling the scaling value it actually calculates the best value between 1x and 2x based on your screen.

Earlier I mentioned that Mint probably wouldn’t work well on a tablet, but this release does improve touchscreen support—there’s a new on-screen keyboard in the login screen which means it’s easier to login from mobile devices.

Cinnamon 2.8 is a welcome update, but it’s worth noting that, while Cinnamon is now available in quite a few distros, Linux Mint remains the stablest, best implementation around. In fact, in my testing Cinnamon 2.8 was considerably buggier than previous versions I have tested with the otherwise very nice Fedora 23. It’s hard to say where the blame for that lies, or if anyone is to blame at all, but at the end of the day if you want the best Cinnamon experience, you’ll find it in Linux Mint.

Linux Mint MATE Edition

The Cinnamon Edition of Linux Mint is very clearly the flagship release. However, while Cinnamon is Mint at it finest, there is also a MATE-based edition Linux Mint which could best be described as “Cinnamon light” and offers a good option for older or less-powerful hardware.

Linux Mint 17.3 features MATE 1.12 and includes some very nice new features, including support for more window managers out of the box. In previous release,s MATE gained support for Compiz (complete with old-school wobbly windows, not enabled by default when you switch the Compiz). Now MATE supports the Compton and Openbox windows manager as well. The latter is particularly welcome since it’s very lightweight and will go a long way to make MATE feel faster on older hardware. The display manager switcher itself has also been updated and can now switch on the fly, eliminating the need to log out and log back in for changes to take effect.

A fair bit of what’s new in MATE involves porting features over form Cinnamon. For instance the power applet features mentioned above are also available in MATE, albeit through a much-simplified interface.

There’s some added hardware support in this release as well, particularly for touchpads, which now offer support for two- and three-finger taps/clicks for right and middle clicks respectively. There’s also now an option to use Apple’s so-called “natural scrolling,” which reverses the direction of scrolling.

Under the hood

The attention to detail in Linux Mint 17.3 is not limited to desktop features, but extends down into shared, lower-level features like Mint’s software and update managers.

Linux Mint has been steadily refining its package-management tools for some time now and that process is still ongoing. Consider the following rather common workflow: you install Mint from a USB stick and now you want to pull down all your applications. On most distros, you open up some kind of “software center” and start downloading. End of story.

The same process is true in Linux Mint, but before you actually start downloading Mint helpfully offers to scan all the available software repo mirrors and find the fastest one. It then tests the speed of the mirrors and makes sure that the packages are up-to-date. The tests will start with the mirrors closest to you and then work down the list. In most cases the fastest mirror will likely be close, though not necessarily the closest. In my case. the default mirror selected during installation tested at 872KBps while the top speed available ended up being 3MBps. It takes an extra minute or two, but being able to download new software and get updates at (in my case) over triple the speed is well worth it.

Two other very nice new features include a warning in the update manager if something is wrong with a current mirror and a compatibility test for any PPAs you add. I also noticed that if you copy a PPA to the clipboard, open the software manager, and click the plus button to add a new PPA, Mint will automatically fill the field with what’s on the clipboard. It’s a small thing (and possibly not new), but it shows the level of polish and attention to detail in Linux Mint.

This release sees a couple of updates for a piece of software I wish more distros would copy: Mint’s Driver Manager. Driver Manager now automatically refreshes, notifies you of any available updates, and indicates if drivers are Open Source or not. When Ubuntu gets back to focusing on the desktop, this would a great piece of downstream work to incorporate into Unity.

The bad news: The kernel

Let’s talk about what you’re not going to get with Mint 17.3: namely, the latest kernel and subsystem packages.

The kernel has indeed been updated since 17.2, but, as noted above, the kernel in Mint 17.3 is still at 3.19. That’s not exactly ancient, but it is a good year behind where nearly every of distro is today. With the exception of a few very conservative distros primarily aimed at server farms, pretty much everything is on the 4.x kernel by now. There’s a good bit of hardware support Mint is missing out on.

The good news though is that Linux Mint 17.3 will be supported until 2019 and the project does plan to offer kernel updates. In fact an update to the 4.2 line is in the software repositories already, though the Mint blog cautions against updating just yet, especially if you’re using any proprietary drivers. The 4.2 kernel in the repos is known to not work with fglrx (ATI/AMD drivers) and ndiswrapper (a fairly common set of wireless drivers). The plan is get these problems fixed “before February 2016” at which point upgrading should be safe.

In other words, a newer kernel is coming, so if your hardware needs it just exercise some patience. Otherwise, if you’re feeling like you need a potentially system-destroying holiday project, you can try the upgrade now on your own.

Conclusion

Linux Mint 17.3 is the final Mint 17 release and should put to rest any worries about Mint’s plan to stick with Ubuntu LTS releases for its base. Mint has done what it set up to do, namely improve the Cinnamon desktop to the point that it not only matches, but in many places far exceeds the user experience found in other options like GNOME, and especially, Unity.

Indeed, it’s hard to look at Mint 17.3 without comparing it to its upstream base. While Mint has been continually working hard on the desktop and cranking out release after release, Ubuntu has stagnated. If Ubuntu wants to leapfrog past some of its pain points, its developers would do well to look downstream. Mint’s package management tools are simpler, more comprehensive, and easier to use than anything Ubuntu offers. Mint also manages to do all this without anything even remotely close to the resources Ubuntu enjoys.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about Mint is that it’s based on Ubuntu, the future of which looks a lot less bright than it used to. There is of course Linux Mint Debian Edition, but it tends to lag well behind its Ubuntu-based brethren when it comes to updates and polish.

Despite the possibly cloudy future of Ubuntu, there’s no reason to panic on Mint’s behalf just yet. The next major step for Mint will be the transition to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS when it’s released in April of 2016. At that point development on Mint-specific features will probably take a back seat to making sure that everything works with the new base. Once that’s done though, expect Mint to return to focusing on what makes Mint great.