Linux Mint 21: The Best Distro. Better.

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to check out linux mint 21 the latest version of the popular linux distro and also my own daily driver so let's go and take a closer look well it's now the 31st of july 2022 and here we are on the linux mint website where linux mint 21 has just been released as we can see it's codenamed vanessa hello vanessa it's going to be very nice to meet you and this is a long-term support or lts release with support until 2027. in terms of system requirements the nuxbin 21 is 64-bit only and requires 2 gigabytes of ram minimum although 4 gigabytes is recommended for comfortable use so let's go to download to get hold of a copy of a new exciting version of linux mint and as we would expect there are three versions available there is the cinnamon edition with a cinnamon desktop the one most people will use that's the one i personally use every day but we also have available an addition with a mate desktop or with an xfce desktop but i'm going to click here on the cinnamon download from there get hold of this one and scroll down good to see they've got an installation guide release note everything's always very well documented very clear with the looks mint and it will go down to the download mirrors for me i want united kingdom somewhere down here there we are and i'll click as i always do on university of kent mirror service and download the iso file when this completes i'll then flash the file to a bootable usb drive boot up from the usb drive into linux mint and run the installer this has not changed in the looks mint 21 so here i'm going to fast forward through the installation process but if you want to see how to install linux mint in detail just look back to my video on linux mint 19. but with the installation here now complete we just need to reboot the machine so we can start to experiment with the looks mint 21. greetings here i am back again and i've now made a few tweaks to this installation so it reads better on video and this is included here in font selection setting the size of different font elements to be slightly bigger and i've also given this a larger mouse pointer and if we resize this window just like that you'll see also in themes i've set a nice large scroll bar width i do like the fact you can do all this stuff very easily in linux mint and i've also let the system install some updates and i've also responded to a prompt to change to the best driver for this pc's nvidia graphics card you might notice down here we've still got a prompt which is telling us to do something but we'll come back to that in a second because right now i'm sure you're asking what is new here in linux mint 21. well one of the most fundamental things is that it's based on ubuntu 2204 rather than ubuntu 2004 for linux mint 20. and this really matters because this is what gives the security updates until 2027 beyond being based on ubuntu 2204 many of the obvious changes here in the looks mint 21 are fairly subtle and i think this is a good thing because it means the design team haven't messed with things for the sake of it however under the hood there are some fundamental changes that improve performance and make the operating system well in some senses better behaved anyway let's start with the obvious stuff and if we go down to the main menu we find that as previously linux mint comes with lots of useful pre-installed software including the latest version of firefox and thunderbird and the latest version of libra office if we go down to preferences we see there's a new bluetooth manager called blumen although i can't show you this working because i haven't got any bluetooth hardware on this computer but if we go back to the menu we can go to notes in accessories the notes application has been slightly updated if we go to a note now we can duplicate a note which apparently is very useful some people wanted that and if we go to the preferences in notes now we go down there like that and like that we can now set the color to cycle so that when you do a new note here we will keep getting a cycle of colors like this which is very exciting and very colorful but i think for now i will close down my notes application if i open up the file manager let's go to home there am i going to open up pictures because in pictures i've got a webp file and we now have native support for the webp file format here in linux mint 21. so if i click on that file there we are we've opened up our webp file in the pics viewer like that and also if we go into the file manager and set to show thumbnails we can see a thumbnail for the webp image and this reflects the fact that more broadly there is wider subnel support because they've added some now support not just for webp files but also for epub mp3 raw images things like that although personally i don't like to use thumbnails on my system one thing i do use though is nice desktop images and if we right click here and change the desktop background you will find we've got lots of new pictures here which we can choose in linux mint 21. that looks rather wacky doesn't it oh yes i rather like that that's a very nice new desktop background and talking of pictures and maybe wanting to print them out or maybe want you to scan images and bring them into the computer linux mint 21 uses ipp or the internet printing protocol to communicate with printers and scanners this is sometimes called driverless printing and scanning and doesn't rely on installed drivers so most printers and most scanners should be detected and should work automatically out of the box this said ipp can be disabled so you can use a manufacturer driver and hp's h clip drivers are installed by default next thing i thought i'd mentioned if we go down to the menu on a menu item in linux mint let's go to say libreoffice draw if we right click there's a nice little sub menu which allows you to do things like adding the application to the panel or the desktop and also to uninstall the application and here in linux mint 21 if you use uninstall from the main menu this now triggers an evaluation of the application's dependencies so this protects the system from the removal of key components and if another package depends on the application you'll get an error message and the uninstall will be stopped i did tell you that linux mint 21 is a slightly better behaved operating system another thing i think we'll find very useful is that there's a new icon which appears down here on the tray to notify users if any automated background processes are running so if your system suddenly feels a bit sluggish you want to know why you can look down here and go oh yes there's something running that's why it's a bit slow right now and you might be thinking what things could be doing that well it could be an update but it could also be if a utility called time shift is taking a system snapshot and i said we come back to the warning here or the message here that something requires our attention and it does and what requires our attention is that linux mint 21 wants us to set up time shift because we haven't done so so far on this system so i will launch timeshift like that i have to put in my password there we go and we have to select a snapshot type i'd recommend you stick with rsync unless you have particular reasons not to and i'm just going to pull this out so we've got more space sometimes needs to fill it up if we go to next on this we can select the drive on which the system will store its system snapshots but that restore points in windows here i'll stick with the drive that linux mint is installed on this other drive here's the one that's got windows on and this computer so i'm going to leave that untouched so i'll just do next down here and then we can pick when we want snapshots to be taken i'll leave it on daily that seems fine to me and we will finish and with time shift set up i'll say two things about it here which are new in linux mint 21. first time shift is now officially maintained by the linux mint team which i think has to be good for linux mint and secondly if we're running time shift in its default rsync mode as we are it now checks before it takes a snapshot to see if it would leave you with less than one gigabyte of free space on the drive it's saving the snapshot too and if this would be the case it won't do it it won't leave you in that position again this is an example of linux mint 21 being a better behaved linux distro right with my favorite linux mint desktop background now selected let's turn to some big changes under the hood and why they matter most notably in the cinnamon edition of linux mint 21 the window manager which is called muffin has received a major update in previous versions of linux mint windows were rendered using two different technologies called gtk and mega city but now everything is rendered using gtk which makes the user interface more consistent and all windows now use gtk anti-aliasing which makes things look crisper in a related development the display manager has been moved into the muffin window manager with improvements apparently made to fractional scaling i say apparently because if we go into preferences and the display manager over here we can see that fractional scaling is now controlled by buttons so let's for example pick one two five percent and apply and keep configuration and yes things have scaled that's not a problem except you might have noticed that my mouse is now much smaller than it was before we actually applied fractional scaling and if we go down to the menu you can also see that's had a got a few issues now this has always been the case in linux mint you've had to do a restart to get things to actually settle down after changing scaling so let's do that and here we are back again you can see our menu has now sorted itself out but our mouse is still very small and if we go into the mouse preferences down here somewhere there we are mouse and touchpad you'll see that i've got a large mouse pointer selected i go right to the top it's still fast more than it was previously or we can have it itty-bitty teeny if we really want but uh this clay doesn't work properly with fractional scaling let's just go back to fractional scaling again preferences and the display and turn it off like that and apply and keep a new configuration our mouse is now much bigger again which is just bizarre and it really means i think here in linux mint 21 the way to control display sizes although the menu has changed again it wants another restart you really have to do things via a font selection and maybe do a scaling factor on the text itself there to give you a larger size display there's all sorts of options here in linux mint i do like linux mint when it comes to the ability to configure things but there does seem to be a slight problem here with fractional scaling as we've already noted linux mint 21 is based on ubuntu 2204. however there are some key features included in ubuntu 2204 that linux mint has decided not to adopt firstly linux mint uses a traditional x-org rather than a wayland display server which is now the default in ubuntu and personally i'm very pleased this is the case secondly linux mint 21 does not include system d-o-o-m-d this is a feature in ubuntu 2204 that tries to prevent out-of-memory errors by shutting down applications but it also created problems and so again i'm pleased that it's not included however linux mint 21 does include the libraries needed to run app image applications which are now not installed by default in ubuntu fourthly linux mint 21 has left the os prober feature in the grub boot menu enabled rather than disabling it as an ubuntu 2204 this will prevent for example microsoft windows from disappearing from the startup menu on a dual boot system that relies on grub finally in the looks mint the snapstore is disabled as you may be aware the snapstore is a software store operated by canonical the publishers of ubuntu and while snap packages offer potential advantages they've also been heavily criticized so if you want to install applications using snap you'll have to enable it in the terminal as we saw earlier linux mint is available with three different desktop environments and as so far we've only seen cinnamon i thought we should at least take a look at the mate and xfce additions so by the magic of filmmaking let's transition from the cinnamon to the mate edition and yes it is pronounced mate it's named after a south american drink although i know there's a lot of debate online about whether we should say mate or mate but regardless what we call this desktop it is a very nice desktop it looks somewhat different to the one in the cinnamon edition as we can see it has slightly fewer features we go for example to the control center and look at displays you'll find we don't have fractional scaling available but this desktop is a little bit more resource efficient than cinnamon it is potentially a little bit more stable and so you might want to try it out if you're not a big fan of the cinnamon edition of linux mint but let's now transition to the third alternative here we are in xfce again with a slightly different type of menu and xfce is the most lightweight of a three desktop environment formerly made available for linux mint so it has the fewest features but it is very stable it's very light on resources and therefore it's a good choice if you want to run the looks mint on older hardware so if you find that linux mint 21 cinnamon edition or even mate is a bit sluggish on your computer do try out xfce in my view linux mint remains the best mainstream desktop linux distro with version 21 being a very solid update certainly in the six days i've been testing it out since it was released i've had no problems although i would always recommend waiting a month or two before upgrading a critical system talking of which as i shoot the end of this video a tool for upgrading from linux mint 20.3 to 21 has just been released to use it in a terminal and to sudo apt install minus y mint upgrade and then sudo mint upgrade this will run a tool that will perform some system checks allowing you to identify and fix issues that might cause problems it will then simulate the upgrade report again and download files before entering the upgrade phase to deliver you the latest version of linux mint so upgrading has been made as painless as possible but issues may still arise and i would strongly advise that you back up first and do wait before you upgrade a critical system but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 114,337

Keywords: Linux Mint 21, new Linux Mint, Linux Mint Vanessa, Vanessa, how to upgrade Linux Mint, Linux Mint 21 upgrade, Linux Mint 21 review, Linux Mint review, what's new in Linux Mint 21, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, top Linux distro, best Linux distro, Linux Mint snap store, Linux Mint snap, Linux Mint Xorg, Linux Mint Wayland, Linux Mint Ubuntu, Ubuntu Linux Mint

Id: s74cta1cpRY

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022