Linux Mint 19.3 - Is it Still the Best Beginner Distro?

hello welcome to the OTB Channel today we're going to look at Linux Mint the latest version 19.3 was released last week and I've not actually looked at this distro before but when it was released in 2006 it quickly gained a reputation for being the go-to distro for beginners to Linux and also for those migrating from Windows does it still deserve that reputation well let's take a look so Linux Mint 19.3 it's called Trisha Linux Mint has always adopted these ladies names for its latest releases and then we have not looked at it on the channel before I have used it in the past and I have to say that over the years Linux Mint would be the distribution that I had tended to recommend to people who were looking to migrate from Windows and as you're all aware there are many reasons that you might want to do that but why Linux Mint well first and foremost back in the day when Linux wasn't that easy to use or many distributions weren't that easy to use Linux Mint set its stall out to be new user friendly it came fully loaded with all the codecs that you could prosser possibly need and it was a friendly interface in fact it rejected the gnome 3 interface when there was that shift from gnome to to gnome 3 and it developed the cinnamon desktop which it still uses in its default mode although you can also download an xfce and amarte Edition now at the time cinnamon was very very specific to Linux Mint and I like the cinnamon desktop I'm a fan I prefer Marte but I do like the cinnamon desktop it is very Windows like and a new user coming over from Windows 7 or Windows 10 would not have a culture shock it looks very similar to what they've been used to it's easy to install and it soon gained a reputation for being the go-to distribution if you were brand new to Linux 2019 though I seen a few changes of opinions most famously I think DT from distro tuber made the comment that Linux Mint should die quite controversially and I suppose his point really was that there are many distros out there in 2019 many of them are very user friendly what does Linux Mint now offer the other distros don't your likes of MX Linux or in I don't know pick any distro that you like I'm just looking here at the distro distro watch page you can go to Ubuntu obviously elementary operating system solace deep in the list goes on of user friendly distros peppermint of course so I think the argument really was it's a bomb - based it's based on the abun - long-term support release if you want to use a bomb - LTS well download and use Ubuntu LTS of course the thing that separated Linux Mint originally was was it had the cinnamon desktop but in this day and age you can now get a version of Ubuntu with the cinnamon desktop as well and most of the district oceans will allow for it to be installed so what we're left with then is what's unique about Linux Mint and does it does its look and feel and usability appeal to you I'll say right now that I don't think any distro should die Linux Mint was one of the big beasts and looking at distro watch it's still number three and no distro watch isn't a true representation of popularity but it would be fair to say that Linux Mint is still an incredibly popular distro and it's noted for its very friendly community it has an active forum which is friendly to new users unlike forums which I believe are less so and I won't mention the arch forum here because although it has the reputation I'm not actually a member so I don't know but anyway look let's make our own minds Minds up and let's give it a spin so on the screen in front of you you should now see VirtualBox and you'll see that the an entry there on the left is for Linux Mint this is the latest version of Linux Mint 19.3 I've applied the normal settings I use in VirtualBox eight gig of ram two cause of my I 5 processor and I've also set it up to boot in EFI mode as I really believe that in this day and age and that's a crucial test so let's boot up and see what happens needless to say as normal the page or the boot up screen goes to my other screen okay so booted not a problem let's start Linux Mint and see what it's like nothing's happening initially but we've seen this again and again with VirtualBox they really need to sort out their efi implementation but anyway it's up and running now and hopefully we should be at the cinnamon desktop and indeed we are let me just see if I can get this resolution to be a little bit better okay well the good news is the VirtualBox guest additions appear to be installed by default so it's booted straight into a full 1920 by 1080 screen which is great and we have well it's got to be said a very nice-looking desktop in front of us we'll go through this after the installation but let's just quickly click on the install Linux Mint icon there and see what the process is okay it appears to be the standard Calamari's installer so let's just continue we want English UK install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware flash mp3 and other media well yeah by all means let's click on that and see where it now takes us Calomiris is pretty much the same with everything every distro these days that uses it and it it's provided us really with a standard base for installing from a live CD so arrays disk and install Linux Mint yes I'd like to do that so let me hit Install Now and I notice straight away that on the automatic option it has picked up that I'm using a UEFI boot and it's creating an ESP partition so great click continue it's picked up the right time zone which isn't that usual so let me just go down here and - my password and it's getting on with the installation so let's speed this section up [Music] right so installation is finished we started around 12 35 it's now 12 41 so six minutes pretty good let's just hit restart now and see what happens please remove the installation media I'm just going to press ENTER I'll see what happens hmm strange for some reason it seems to be stuck up no there we are it's booting straight away or we hope is right well I have to say that was an incredibly fast boot so let's just log in and see what happens and there we have our Linux Mint desktop with a little welcome screen at the beginning and telling me my system is currently we are running without video hardware acceleration and asking if I'd like to launch the driver manager well I'll tell you what let's launch the driver manager and see what it can find I would be surprised if it actually finds anything whilst it's running on virtual VirtualBox but we'll see in a second the answer would appear to be no ok no problem so let's work our way around this screen right so the welcome screen I know in this day and age there are many distros that include a welcome screen but Linux Mint I believe was one of the first and it provides basically links for new users when they first install the system so after the welcome let's move down to first steps right so one of the things Linux Mint enables right from the outset is an application to take system snapshots absolutely great idea you can take a snapshot and revert to that snapshot if things go wrong so almost like for the Windows user when windows used to do constant restore states or restore backups we then have a link to the driver manager to check whether or not there are any proprietary or free drivers that could be installed for your system the update manager let's launch that see what happens welcome to the update manager ok it provides your operating system with software security updates let's have a look this would appear to be their own update manager by the looks of it you can of course still use apt on the command line please switch to another Linux Mint mirror your apt configure the configuration is corrupt interesting I switched and just before I switched on the recording to a UK mirror so let's see what the problem is right so there's my official repositories let's go for I don't know University of Kent mirror why not and let's try something else here mmm let's go for bite mark oh god you've got to be quick and click ok and it appears to be downloading now but not very quickly so let's get this sorted and we'll come back in a second oh no it's worked right so let's click that off and let's refresh I'm sure there's going to be many updates are available to install from here a new version of the update manager is available okay well let's apply the update and see what happens from there Linux Mint is still based on the LTS version of a bomb - I do sort of wonder to myself why they didn't just wait until the next LTS is released in April but hey ho so yeah there's quite a few updates there but we're not gonna bother with them not on this stage anyway so updates fairly straightforward to do desktop layout choose your favorite desktop layout we can choose the traditional layout or the modern layout let's click traditional and see what happens if anything uh-huh so it's changed it slightly slightly smaller panel and I have to say I prefer that look myself but it came by default with the modern so let's click back on modern and see if it switches seamlessly which it seems to do ok great then we have an option for system settings let's launch that from here and this won't be something that would put any previous window user off very much like the Linux Mint version of the windows control panel in fact the whole look and feel of this Desktop should be quite comfortable for Windows users it's not using any strange layout that's going to catch them off-guard so what do we have appearance to start off with right at the beginning so let's have a look quite a few default backgrounds to use there okay that's quite nice if you like green and I notice on the menu here that you can actually go through all the default wallpapers from previous distributions which I wish every distro would do that haha there's an awful lot to choose from Tina these are all the names of the various distributions that Linux Mint has had so burning coal let's have a look at that one oh it's interesting it's certainly colorful okay let's just go back up to the standard Linux Mint one and set what I think oh that wasn't the default yeah that looks pretty much like the default so okay lots of nice wallpapers to choose from from the offset we then have the software manager 60,000 applications available now I'm not the greatest fan of software stores I have to be honest I tend to find that it's easier to install things from the command line but fine we have editors picks up here we can move to different sections here what about if I choose something up in the top left and our search for OBS studio for instance right I see that I actually have two different options now I believe that mint uses flat packs rather than snaps which upon so uses a bunt Oh uses the fact that we've got two options here makes me wonder what are one of the options is indeed a flat pack right well that makes sense to an extent this is version 24 if we install the flat pack and the one from the standard repose is version 21 I know on my Debian stable system I use flat packs for OBS studio and kdenlive so that I can use the latest version and clearly you have that option with Linux Mint which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned because if you're going to stick with a long term support release you may find that some of the applications that you use are slightly dated flat-pack is one way to or even Snapp D if your distribution there supports it is one way to overcome that so okay we can click on the sections and Microsoft core fonts installer etc etc so it's a pretty standard software store offers the opportunity of installing flat packs out of the box from a store if you like which is useful what about the firewall and presuming it uses you fw + g u fw as the GUI but let's have a look yes it does there's g u fw and i see it status is currently not on that's not a huge issue in linux but you can clearly play around with that and the fact that it's on your welcome screen right from the word go is a good thing so let's move down to the next stage documentation the linux mint documentation consists of a collection of guides available in each PDF epub and HTM HTML and available in many languages so let's launch that and see what happens right so essentially this is a link to the website so if I wanted to launch it in English okay so it comes up with an installation guide that's fine but of course we've just installed it anyway let's go to the post installation stage okay so it tells us about installing drivers there what about multimedia codecs right so if we take the box which we did on installing everything's already going to be installed but we can launch the codec installer from the launch menu sound and video hmm okay and install multimedia codecs what we haven't even got that option here I am assuming that's because we've already done this stage nevertheless it would be nice to have that option there in the menu that matched up with there with what it's telling us on the manual and now it tells us all about system snapshots and how you can backup using rsync or btrfs butter FS as they call it etc etc okay all good we then have a button where we can look at the new features and 19.3 cinnamon what's actually happened okay well let's click out of that now we can always get back to the settings menu by clicking here and there you go everything that you could possibly need to look at the system is pretty much here a link to the backgrounds thanks whatever window effects that you want font selection okay and themes the way that cinnamon manages themes I've always quite liked in as much as you can click on any of these options and you get these little pop-ups coming for you to choose whichever theme you want all good standard cinnamon features now then accessibility account details applets okay so you can install these if you wish date and time desk let's okay fine little desk widgets that you can add the desktop okay so which icons do you want on your desktop so let's have the rubbish bin as well and it appears straight away okay extensions so no extensions installs so far but if we go to download there's a whole range of extensions here that we can apply including the old complex compass wobbly windows please don't the desktop cube etc etc right fine very configurable as you can see the general option compositor options okay hot corners you can setup hot corners languages notifications online accounts write all the standard gnome online accounts that you can add the panel do you want to also hide it how big do you want it what you want it to look like etc etc preferred applications that's a nice clean layout I have to say privacy screen saver startup application windows do you want to move the buttons that are currently on the right or do you want to use a Mac style on the left completely up to yourself workspaces on window tiling okay the one thing about cinnamon is it is very configurable I used it myself for a little while in fact I run mint for perhaps about five or six months several years ago and I enjoyed the cinnamon desktop it is a little heavy though I don't know if haitch top is already installed on this but let's see no it's not let's see if we can install it I know I should have run their apt update to start off with but I'm just very quickly trying to find edge top here that's actually not that bad 680 Meg's yeah he used to be said that cinnamon was quite hungry as far as Rams concerned but to be honest all desktop environments are pretty much on a par now we're talking you know a few hundred ram with most people having four gigs a gig 16 gigs even 32 gigs what's a couple of hundred Meg's between friends for older desktops perhaps cinnamon isn't the very best option that you can use there are certainly lighter weight desktops but to be honest it's not a big thing now let's have a look at the menu and see what we've got out of the box have a look at the about so this is the mint menu I do like this I have to say I know it's available in some other distros now I wish it was available in all because though Marte is my favorite distro I would much prefer it to have this mint menu so let's go down to accessories what have we got installed by default archive manager calculator image viewer redshift okay so this is to make it easy on the eyes when it gets to night time a screenshot tool attack steady - what text editor does it use by default it uses Z okay I've used that before it's fine graphics we have a drawing application simple drawing utility let's have a look at that excuse me and it's just called drawing okay fine I'm not familiar with that at all um I would have liked to have seen the installed by default but easy enough to get what about the internet we have hex chat Firefox thumbed about Thunderbird and transmission okay all good the LibreOffice suite celluloid I have our play movies and videos I've not heard of celluloid before about celluloid a gtk front end for MPV okay what about admin you've got a backup tool there disk usage analyzer let's have a quick look okay so it's going to analyze what's on the system in OTB VirtualBox and how it's quite nice to say so it's just telling us what's what fine what else you've got your driver manager H top now appears there the login window right so you can set your background very very easily here I think it's using the slick greeter don't know but all nice and clean power statistics printers software manager software sources synaptic package manager' would be my personal favorite for installing packages system reports time shift now if time shift that's the backup facility or app that allows you to take snapshots why have we also got a backup tool here ok so this isn't a full snapshot backup tool it just lets you backup file settings etc etc ok good what about preferences well here you've got all the individual contents from your settings places recent files okay so this is Linux Mint set a cinnamon it's a really nice looking desktop cinnamon is incredibly flexible as far as configuring it is concerned I don't think a Windows user or someone coming from Windows would have a problem with this the issue of course is were there linux mint as a distribution separating it from the fact that it's got the cinnamon desktop whether it offers anything special to the gnu/linux user let's go and have a chat about that so that's linux mint 19.3 so i suppose the big question here is would i use it and do i still think it deserves the reputation of being the beginners district no I wouldn't use it as your answer to the first question I have used it in the past nothing against the distro itself I would prefer personally to stay closer to the source hence as you know I use Debian stable for work and are actual in exert to play having said that as a distro that stands on its own I think it's incredibly well put together it boots fast it's beautiful looking it really is I like the tools that it comes with I like its default configuration it feels very solid and very stable and so is it a great beginners distro yeah I think it is I think it would be a distro that new Windows users would easily be able to get used to but is it the beginners distro I think that's a hard title to live up to these days there are lots of distros out there that are beginner friendly these days they're MX Linux and peppermint's r2 that constantly I'm surprised that everytime I look at them and Linux Mint is of course competing in that space in that beginning user space against those distros which each are brilliant in their own right it doesn't take anything away from Linux Mint I've often said that it doesn't really matter which distro you use now it's all about the package manager and the look and feel the package manager is apt nothing wrong with that look and fail it's beautiful but for me I like to configure things from scratch that said you know Linux Mint is a great out-of-the-box experience and I still think it deserves a reputation as one of the Great's that we have in the Linux world does it deserve to die absolutely not and I'm sure it will continue to go on from strength to strength the fact that the distribution and the devs of the distribution were responsible for putting together the cinnamon desktop I think is also you know great praise and I'm very grateful that they did it because it gives us another choice so that's it for today christmas is almost upon us not sure if there'll be another video before then but I'm sure I'll produce something between Christmas and New Year so cheers everyone see you next time [Music] you

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 67,081

Keywords: oldtechbloke, linux mint 19.3, linux mint install, linux mint cinnamon, linux mint 19.3 cinnamon, linux mint, what is new in linux mint, linux mint 19.3 new features, linux mint cinnamon for beginners, is linux mint for beginners, linux mint for windows users, linux mint 19.3 review, cinnamon, linux mint tricia, linus mint cinnamon review, 19.3, setting up linux mint 19.3, review, linux mint 2019, switched to linux, linux mint review

Id: bfRE2rLdnFQ

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019