Linux Mint 21.3 Review: solid Wayland support!

Linux Mint 21.3 was released last week and while you should not expect a ton of visual or functional enhancements it does come with one pretty major feature a whan session obviously it is still experimental but it's complete enough that I could give it a fair Shake on top of looking at everything else that Min 21.3 brings to the table so here is a little walkr of all the changes to this very popular dis Dro and here is also another walk through to this segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by Thunderbird most of you probably know about it but for those who don't it's an all-in-one Suite that handles email calendar contacts tasks RSS feeds and chats Thunderbird recently received a giant update with a full redesign of the app that makes it easier than ever to set up your accounts and to be productive the interface is very customizable with multiple choices for interface density view modes panels and the ability to place any button you need in the top bar after this update Thunderbird is now my email and calendar client of choice although it's fully open source it's free of charge and it's available for any Linux distribution Windows and Mac OS so whether you used Thunderbird in the past or not click the link in the description below and give the new release a try you will not regret it so let's begin with the basics min 21.3 is still based on auntu 22.4 their next release will be based on 24.4 but for now you still have that old auntu LTS base its old packages and its super old kernel version 5.15 you do get the Mesa drivers version 23 but not the latest Point update and you don't get the latest NVIDIA drivers either you're still on 535 now mint does have a newer ISO Plan called The Edge ISO which will pack in a newer Linux kernel at least so you can run mint on newer Hardware but the base version is still pretty damn old apart from that you're getting cinnamon 6 the latest update to the default desktop environment and you can also get the usual mate and xfce variants although these didn't get any updates to their desktop environments you're just getting the app updates here and so with that out of the way let's take a look at the new experimental whan session for cinnamon because that's the main event here so you can select that whan session from the login screen like you would select another desktop environment to start I tested this on a spare laptop that uses an Intel XE integrated GPU and also has a dedicated Nvidia GPU and I tried the whon session using both cards so at first glance everything seems to work okay we windows are displayed correctly the display resolution is set how it should be you don't get any screen tearing that I could see at least and the cinnamon desktop responds normally with its rightclick menus minimizing maximizing Edge styling and the like the performance also felt completely normal it even detected the 90 HZ refresh rate of my display video playback in Firefox and other applications worked with picture in picture as well all the audio Plumbing worked as well well multim monitor support seemed okay with both displays being recognized and things moving normally from One display to the other but it is an experimental session so not everything is finished just yet you didn't expect everything to be okay right it's Linux we're talking about and yeah a lot of things are still missing OBS for example doesn't even start using the de package the flat pack works but has no source for the display cinnamon doesn't see seem to support the screen sharing protocol through pipe wire so OBS has nothing to display here so that's the first main thing you will not be sharing your screen to anyone just yet not even in web browser based stuff like jitsy and no screen recorder I tried could capture anything either here neither simple screen recorder nothing works with that experimental Wayland session so these captures are mainly from a VM another issue I encountered is the lack of any pseudo graphical prompt anytime I needed to install a package or update the system I had to use the command line as the graphical app would not spawn a graphical password prompt and the task would just fail I also got some inconsistencies in the place where menus appeared for example when right- clicking certain notification tray icons their menus displayed in the wrong place some applets displayed their menu just fine but others didn't and opened like a window following the window placement that I defined this basic window positioning setting worked fine though I could set Windows to open centered as everyone should and it worked perfectly there and some applications behaved erratically the main one is steam it either got stuck on the login screen or it displayed a fully black window with nothing in there and generally it was unable to quit that was with the dab package the flat pack ran normally sometimes but not always taking very long long to display my library window but it did allow me to try out a game and see how it performed so keep watching to know how this went there were also a few things that I couldn't find like changing the keyboard layout in the whan session it doesn't seem possible the layout stab doesn't appear in the settings where it should be the gestures of cinnamon also don't work here for now you can enable them but they will not do anything and you know I love my gestures and whand is the best place to have G gesture so hopefully they will Implement them in a suitable way like one to one gestures where stuff moves As you move your fingers but for now it's not there the hot Corners did work though with their nice animations and features but there were some weird graphical things happening for example when trying to display all windows the windows moved in position they spread across the screen but you could still see them in the background as if cineman had taken a screenshot of the display before moving the windows into a expose mode some settings pages also seem to have some sort of infinite scroll and didn't stop at their own content which was a bit weird but xwayland seemed to work okay here since I could actually open a steam window and a game using the flatback dragging icons from the desktop also doesn't seem to work properly as the icon gets stuck a few pixel from the initial drag point and it doesn't move with the cursor although the dragging operation can still succeed so all in all it's really not bad but it is living up to its name it is an experimental session and that was all using the Intel integrated GPU I did try it with the Nvidia GPU as well so by default mint uses the novo drivers which obviously will not work all that well with the RTX 3050 TI I have on that laptop so I installed the proprietary drivers for that card at the version mint offers which is 535 so not the latest with all the whan fixes and then I rebooted after that I tried the whan session and all the problems I experienced previously were still there obviously they are all missing features in the experiment all session so there's no reason to expect them to work better on Nvidia but I also didn't get any other issue that I hadn't seen in the Wayland session with the Mesa drivers it just works exactly the same with Nvidia or Intel and before you start commenting furiously that whan plus Nvidia doesn't work yes yes it absolutely does I've been using Fedora and then tuxedo OS on hybrid graphics laptops with dedicated Nvidia gpus on hybrid mode I've been using full Nvidia on a desktop and I never encountered any major problems so yes it does work mostly because I had recent gpus but it does work now just as a little experiment I also decided to run a game in the whan session namely Warhammer 40K mechanicus because well I have have started a mechanicus army for the real tabletop game of 40K and I just got my butt kicked by a nekron playing friend this weekend so well I like 40K and I like the tech priest so suei I'm playing that game and yeah if you didn't understand a single word I just say don't worry it's not super relevant to this video so playing that game on the Wayland session actually worked well without the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed I could only manage 25 to 32 FPS in game which is is normal as even though that game isn't super demanding it is still too much for the poor XE Graphics playing the same game on X11 with the same drivers and the same settings I got 32 to 37 FPS which is more stable and a little bit better with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed and running the game using the dedicated GPU I got 65 to 75 FPS on X11 and 60 to 65 on whan which is again in favor of X11 not surprising since the game is played using xwayland and this has a performance penalty so of course it is not super representative it's just one game but it does prove that xwayland works on that experimental session that proton works and that accelerated GPU rendering also works which is not bad for a first run of a session okay so now let's talk about the other changes in Linux Min 21.3 because Wayland isn't all that has been add added in terms of app updates hypnotics the TV watching app now lets you set channels as favorites and you can access all these favorites using the star icon on the home screen you can also create your own custom TV channels if you want by just adding a URL for a video stream and setting a name and icon and you'll be able to access it at any time from the app hypnotics will also now let you update the version of YouTube downloader that it uses to stream YouTube channels because the package in the repos just is not updated often enough to catch up with the changes YouTube makes cinamon will also let you download actions these are add-ons for the file manager that will appear in the rightclick context menu letting you do well custom actions like verifying an ISO file creating a bootable USB drive and more so in the actions window which you can find in the main menu you will now be able to download new context menu entries and to add them to Nemo the file manager warp inator the file sharing app now lets you connect to a device manually by just entering its IP address or scanning a QR code the sticky notes app can now be managed by debus meaning you can manage your notes using scripts and the bulk rename tool of mint now supports drag and drop and thumbnails so pretty small changes all around it's not going to change how you use your system or your Dro it's really minor updates as per the desktop itself you can now use 75 % fractional scaling on X11 if you want that you can also set key binds to change the window opacity again you can disable stylus buttons if you use that sort of hardware and gestures got a bit better with the ability to set a gesture to zoom in on the desktop again small changes it will not change how you use your system so if you already use mint to upgrade to 21.3 all you have to do is launch the update manager click the refresh button so you can get an update to the update manager itself and then click on the edit menu and then upgrade to Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia and that's it you're done after the download install and reboot you'll be using the latest mint version so obviously 21.3 is a minor version and mint has a habit of shipping big features in minor updates and this is the case because a full-on whand session even experimental is a pretty giant feature and it's honestly not that bad it is pretty cool to see that their first iteration of that session is already pretty damn complete apart from screen sharing and a few bugs here and there and a few missing features it's already working well mint expects whan to be fully baked in in 2026 and it won't be the default for the next major version mint 22 I would expect the Debian based version of mint to also support Wayland with the same capabilities and so it's good to see that mint despite taking their sweet time to get started on working on that Wayland session has done the brunt of the work in relatively little time and also it means that mint is now way more future proof because at some point obuntu and Debian will drop X11 from their repos so the sooner you have a fully working whand session the better you are prepared for that future that will come 2 years 5 years 10 years but it's coming and if you don't care about Wayland at all 21.3 is still a worthy update for any mint user and if you tried Linux Mint and it didn't quite work on your recent Hardware well you can wait for the edge ISO to drop to get a better Linux kernel and make sure that you can run that great experience that mint has on your new Linux computer and speaking of new Linux computers well let's talk about our sponsor tuxedo computers is based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and what they ship is Linux desktops laptops and no mean meaning that the hardware ships with Linux pre-installed and all that Hardware has been picked specifically because it runs really well with Linux and if they encountered any problems during their testing of these computers they actually submit patches Upstream to fix the issues for everyone they have a big range of devices that will cover every price point and every power level from Ultrabooks to gaming laptops to Towers to workstations they have everything all the hardware is pretty customizable including your own keyboard l out on your laptop your own logo engraved on the lid and you can also pick from a selection of popular dis Ros or you can just slap your own on it all the laptops can be opened repaired and upgraded and basically tuxedo computers is all I use these days to run the channel and to game as my Steam OS console running Holo ISO is also a tuxedo PC so if you need a new computer and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy yourself a tuxedo PC so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's always that dislike button and the comment section to tell me why I suck and if you want to support the channel because you really like what I'm doing well there are plenty of links in the description of the video to do just that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 105,988

Keywords: linux distro, linux tutorial, linux 2023, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux mint, linux mint 21.3, linux mint vs ubuntu, linux mint gaming, linux mint 21.3 virginia, linux mint review, install wayland linux mint, linux mint 21.3 wayland, linux mint 21.2 wayland, linux mint 21.3 xfce, linux mint 21.3 cinnamon, linux mint 21.3 review, linux mint 21.3 release date, linux mint 21.3 mate, linux mint 21.3 upgrade, linux mint 21.3 edge, linux mint 21.3 download

Id: 9vjVT-Pp4R8

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024