Linux Mint Has Three Flavors. Which Is Right For You?

are you a new linux user or are you thinking about switching to linux maybe you're thinking about leaving windows or mac and switching over to linux if you are you've probably done a little bit of research you've asked around on the internet hey what's the best linux distribution for a beginner probably one of the most common answers to that question is linux mint linux mint is a linux distribution that many people begin with as far as a first linux distribution to install and it's great it's perfect for beginners it's very new user friendly but when you go to linux mint their website to download an edition of linux mint they actually have three different editions as far as main desktop editions they have the cinnamon edition they have the mate edition and they have the xfce edition and if you're brand new to linux you probably have no idea what those terms are what's the difference between these three linux mint distributions which one should i choose as a brand new user so today i'm going to cover the differences between the three main flavors of linux mint and which one is probably the best one for you to choose so let's first take a look at linux mint cinnamon because cinnamon really is kind of their flagship desktop environment but the linux mint team actually develops the cinnamon desktop environment it is probably what they spend most of their time on actually is developing this particular desktop environment now if you're new to linux we should talk about what a desktop environment actually is so when we talk about cinnamon mate and xfce those are desktop environments there's dozens of desktop environments available for you to use in linux a desktop environment what that is that is a bundle of components that makes up your desktop so we're talking about the panel or the dock and we're talking about the menu system we're talking about the suite of applications that come bundled with the desktop environment we're talking about everything you're seeing on the screen right now this is your desktop environment another common term for this would be a graphical user interface sometimes you'll hear that term gui gui and what we're talking about there is again the graphical user interface is what you're seeing we're essentially talking about your desktop environment now one of the really cool things that the linux mint team does is they really make cinnamon mate and xfce look very similar like when you first log in to any of the three editions of linux mint the workflow and the look and feel is almost exactly the same when you log into cinnamon the very first thing you notice is you get a welcome screen this is a little helper screen here where you can read documentation and figure out a little bit about linux mint and how to tweak it and things like that you'll notice that you have this traditional windows kind of workflow as far as there's a panel at the bottom you have the menu system at the far left you can think of it as like the windows start menu and if i switched over to the mate desktop this is the mate desktop when you first log in once again you get the linux mint welcome screen here you have a panel at the bottom you have a menu system looks a little different the the menu system here in mate compared to cinnamon but it's very traditional as far as windows users would be very comfortable in both mate and cinnamon and if i switch over here to the xfce edition of linux mint you see it has that same kind of paradigm that same look and feel so you have the welcome screen that first pops up you have a panel at the bottom you have your start menu if you will at the bottom left again the menu system is a little different because again cinnamon mate xfce they're different desktop environments so they the panels are actually different programs the menu system is a different program the suite of applications is they're going to be differences between you know they're not all going to have the same text editor for example or the same terminal emulator maybe not even the same audio player and video player and things like that you'll have their own suite of applications that make up that particular desktop environment so let me go back to this cinnamon desktop environment let's talk about cinnamon what is cinnamon well it's a modern innovative full-featured desktop environment right it's very polished very slick looking the uh downside to cinnamon is that because it's more modern it does require a little bit more system resources it'll take up a little bit more cpu a little bit more ram to run it's still much much lighter than things like windows and mac but for linux desktop environments cinnamon is a little heavier it's going to be the heaviest of the three but if you've got any halfway decent computer cinnamon will run just fine on it if you got something that's really old maybe it's something that doesn't even have a multi-core cpu maybe you only have four gigs of ram or even less maybe you have a hard drive rather than a ssd you know something kind of old right you've got a potato of a machine cinnamon is probably uh the worst of the desktop environments to put on a machine like that but if you've got anything halfway decent cinnamon will run just fine looking at some of the applications that come installed with linux mint cinnamon let's start with the web browser because that's the application most computer users spend their most of their time in right everybody these days spends pretty much 99 of their time in a web browser so let's talk about the web browser because it's going to be the same in all three editions it doesn't matter if it's cinnamon mate xfce the web browser is going to be mozilla firefox which is free and open source software it's one of the biggest pieces of free and open source software on the planet and this is firefox version 89.0.2 by the way the version of linux mint that we are running all three versions we're running today are version 20.2 which was just released just a few days ago the file manager inside linux mint is a program called nemo it's a very slick looking file manager it's one of the best file managers available and file managers we have dozens available on linux kind of like we have dozens of desktop environments you know you can find alternatives to all the software on linux if you find a program that's just not working for you chances are there's dozens of alternatives for that task so if you don't like the text editor or the terminal or the file manager or your audio player just open up the software center and find a replacement for it we should talk about software all three versions of linux mint are gonna have a software center here it's called software manager so the software manager for those of you that are used to other operating systems think of it as your app store and and you just do a search for example if i wanted a video player i could just start typing video player and let's just see what comes up for suggestions and you see i get a whole bunch of suggestions i could just read through this and pick one that sounds good i can try it out if i install something and i don't like it you can always uninstall it too adding and removing software is really really easy in linux it's completely different than the way you did it in windows where typically in windows you go and find a random piece of software on somebody's website download it hope it's not something malicious hope it's not full of viruses and things like that you install it and hope it runs right and then when you don't want it anymore how do you get rid of it typically people don't uninstall things from windows they just leave stuff around that's not the way it works on linux you install all of your software and remove all of your software through a package manager such as the software center that i just showed you on the screen everything's managed through that and you never have to worry about is this package malicious because you're getting it from the linux mint team they curate that software center so you don't have to worry you know if you're downloading something that all of a sudden it's going to take over your machine and you know start mining bitcoin unbeknownst to you you know that doesn't really happen to us on linux now i mentioned that cinnamon was the heaviest of these three desktop environments meaning it's the one that's going to require the most cpu the most ram is the one that's going to benefit the most from having things like a ssd rather than a spinning hard drive now that's not to say that cinnamon again is you know slow and bloated or heavy compared to windows cinnamon is blazing fast chances are if you're coming from windows you wipe out windows and install linux mint cinnamon you're going to be amazed at the speed improvements it's just compared to the other desktop environments that linux mint has available cinnamon is probably the slowest of the three so let me open up a terminal and i'll actually show you what i'm talking about here so i'm going to open up this terminal and i'm going to make it a little bigger so you guys can read this i'm going to run this program called h-top h-top is not installed in linux mint by default i installed it off-camera but what this does it tells me is how much cpu and how much ram we're currently using and i gave this virtual machine that i'm running linux mint in i gave it four gigs of ram and cinnamon's taking up 736 megs that's actually pretty good even though that's gonna be heavier than the other two desktops i show 736 megs of four gigs of ram is actually very very good it's using a little cpu about four percent five percent of the cpu and we're not really doing much so it is taxing the cpu just a little bit but let's see how that compares to mate so now i'm back in the monte desktop environment and i'm gonna once again open a terminal i'll make it full screen and i'll zoom way in and i'll run the h-top program here and you can see four gigs of ram once again but now we're only using 559 megs of ram so you know a couple of hundred megs of ram less than cinnamon so mate is a little lighter also the cpu it's not really being taxed at all we're only using about one or two percent of the cpu where we're using about four or five percent on cinnamon and finally let's switch over to the xfce desktop environment and once again i'm gonna open up a terminal make it full screen and i'll zoom in and we will run h top one more time and this time four gigs of ram but we're only using 516 megs so just slightly less than mate actually mate and xfce are about the same xfce is a little lighter no cpu really being used at all so almost none xfce is the lightest of the three choices so if you had something that was a little older maybe your machine is i don't know eight years 10 years old might be 12 years old xfce is definitely the one i would suggest trying first let me switch back to the mate edition earlier i talked about a little bit of the history of cinnamon how cinnamon the desktop environment was actually created by the folks at linux mint the linux mint team is also behind much of the development of the monte desktop environment that's why these two particular desktop environments are main editions of linux mints because they actually help develop these desktop environments mate is an old fork of gnome version 2. gnome is another desktop environment available in linux and there was a version of it version 2 that was end of life about 10 years ago and people really loved that particular desktop environment so they forked the project renamed it mate and it kind of lives on today the old gnome 2 desktop environment as mate now mate is spelled all caps right but it's actually an acronym it's m-a-t-e and it's pronounced mate the stress is on the first syllable and mate is actually a recursive backronym so in free software we love recursive acronyms for example you guys probably have heard of gnu gnu what does gnu stand for it stands for good news not unix so a recursive acronym is an acronym that actually refers to itself and that's what mate is mate stands for the mate traditional advanced environment so it refers to itself in the acronym it's kind of a nerdy thing that people love to do with free and open source software is use these recursive acronyms while we're at it we should actually talk about xfce what does xfce stand for what is its history xfce is a very old desktop environment that started more than 20 years ago and xfce originally stood for the x-forms common environment and it was spelled all caps xfce because it was an acronym but the xfce has been rewritten a couple of times major changes to it it no longer uses the xforms toolkit it is a gtk based desktop environment just like cinnamon just like mate so it didn't make sense for them to rename it you know to something different they kept the name xfce but what they did is they dropped the the spelling as far as the capitalization now only the x is capitalized and it really doesn't stand for anything anymore they just kept the name just because that's always been the name now getting back to which edition of linux mint you should choose if you're brand new to linux you're just coming over and you you've decided to use linux mint as your first linux distribution well i would start with the cinnamon desktop environment if you have any kind of modern machine that's got a reasonable amount of ram safe and you know more than four gigs but most machines now i don't think you can even buy machines anymore that have less than eight gigs so you're probably good on the cinnamon desktop environment and it looks good it's the most modern it's the one that the linux mint team spends the most time working on and it's the one they recommend people try first and that's the one i recommend people try first if you're coming from windows especially you're going to feel right at home in the cinnamon desktop environment now if you've got an older machine what i would suggest is trying the mate desktop instead of the cinnamon desktop mate a little easier on cpu usage ram usage and it looks good it's very fast very pippy and it will really bring older equipment back to life machines that they stand no chance of running windows 10 or certainly not the upcoming windows 11 that's going to have even more system requirements mate will bring those laptops back to life and if you're a complete speed freak then i would strongly suggest xfce it's going to be the fastest and the lightest desktop environment available on linux mint and it looks good and maybe it has an older kind of retro look to it because again this desktop environment's been around for a while it still sees updates and people are still working on it but it does have a little bit of that kind of retro that vintage look to it but if you're trying to get the most speed the most bang for your buck as far as resource usage xfce is definitely the way to go and other than performance and how it works with your hardware the other big thing is just personal preference you know which one do you like more which one do you enjoy using more and of course the only way you're going to know that is to actually try out all three and that's very easy to do so what i would suggest start with the cinnamon desktop you know go download the cinnamon iso from the linux mint website and burn it to a usb stick and then plug it into your computer and reboot and you will boot into a live version of linux mint cinnamon and just play around with it for a little bit see if you like it if you like it maybe that's the one to install you know if you play around with it and you're not liking it it doesn't seem like it's going to be that great for you it's not going to work for you then go download the mate iso burn that to the usb stick and try that out in a live environment if that's not working for you try the xfce or just try all three anyway just to see which one you prefer another thing you can do is actually install these inside a virtual machine so virtualbox is a very popular virtual machine program it's available on windows mac and linux so if you're on windows you can install virtualbox on windows and then inside that you can install linux mint cinnamon for example and it doesn't affect your hard drives or anything it's perfectly safe but it allows you to test drive some of these other operating systems without ever touching your windows installation so try all three out because largely it's a matter of taste which one you prefer and maybe you don't prefer any of these maybe you want to try out another linux distribution altogether ultimately you know the right linux for you is the one where you feel right at home now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank ebsy gabe james mitchell paul west comey alan chuck curt david dilling gregory iryan alexander peace arch and fedora polytechner scott steven and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors it's just me and you guys the community if you like what i do and want to support my work look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace they don't have an open box edition

Channel: DistroTube

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Keywords: linux mint, linux mint cinnamon, best linux distro, ubuntu vs mint, linux mint mate vs cinnamon, linux mint mate, switched to linux, linux mint mate vs xfce, linux mint mate vs cinnamon vs xfce, windows vs linux, leaving windows for linux, linux, gnu linux, cinnamon desktop, mate desktop, xfce desktop, desktop environment, linux desktop, linux desktop environment, which linux is best, which linux distro to use, distrotube

Id: KqklXzC03HA

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021