Minimalist vs Modern - Linux Mint 20.1

welcome back blaine here and we are going to get into linux mint 20.1 the uh the first service pack release i guess you could say for the linux mint 20 series now what i want to do in today's video rather than just outright reviewing linux mint 20.1 because i think most of you are familiar with what linux mint 20 is up to by now what i want to do is i want to i want to pit the cinnamon edition against the mate edition and try and help those who might be considering linux mint 20.1 decide which desktop will better suit them now obviously notably absent is the xfce edition and that's just because i haven't spent a whole lot of time digging through it up till this point so i've got plenty of stuff to share i'm going to start this video basically break it down into three parts the first part is just going to be talking about what linux mint regardless of which desktop environment you choose has to offer you the desktop user then in the second part i'm going to bring what linux mint mate brings to the table so what can you expect what are the pros and the cons of running that desktop environment and then the third part is going to be what linux mint cinnamon brings to the party and and why or how that might be a better option for you or not depending on your setup so that's where we're headed with the video today if this is something that you are looking forward to then hit the like button and uh definitely subscribe as we push on towards 70 000 subscribers that's kind of nuts uh so thank you guys for that uh so let's get into this linux mint [Music] 20.1 so for the uninitiated which i'm pretty sure is very few of you linux mint uh has been around for a long time and it is a fantastic desktop linux distribution now the reason why i say that it is pretty much unequivocally one of the best linux desktops out there is because that release after release they're always prioritizing the end desktop user and by end desktop user i mean like your average desktop user not so much your power user or your software developer or coder that kind of thing although i'm sure those crowds are really happy with this distro as well so part one we're going to talk about what are the fundamentals of linux mint and what does it give you that is quite unique to linux mint and it doesn't matter which edition you choose cinnamon mate xfce you are going to enjoy uh these things all right so i've got notes off to the side so if i keep glancing off to the side you know where i'm looking first up we have the welcome screen this is common to both cinnamon and mate and it uh it just depends on which desktop environment you're running as to some of the options that show up but it's pretty consistent across both fantastic welcome screen that i've talked about several times smooth really smooth transitions between each of these slides and it will pop up by default when you first launch linux mint after a fresh install now you can choose things like what desktop colors you want on your desktop you can choose between light mode and dark mode and i'm pretty sure this does hold up between the different desktops as well so i could choose a for example an aqua highlight color and a dark theme and there you go it's changed it all right out of the box for me i'll return it to default for now just so that we can maintain consistency it also prompts you to set up system snapshots through time shift this is a fantastic feature that's enabled by default on mint you have a driver manager so you can go and grab your nvidia drivers or any other drivers you might need system settings both launchers the uh very consistent and uh centralized control centers on both desktops so whether you're on ubuntu mate or on cinnamon you get a fantastic control center that has everything from the user space from the hardware and just the software management in general you can find it all in those system settings you also get a fantastic software manager and this is common across all the linux mint desktops it's very functional and it is quite performant however i would say that it's not the prettiest thing to look at also it does have fantastic integration of packages and flat hub enabled out of the box so that just means that you have an extra repository of software that you can access chances are more up-to-date versions of software than what is in the linux mint and ubuntu 20.04 repositories by default the custom software manager for linux mint definitely seems to handle bulk installs a lot better than what ubuntu software or the gnome software manager does that's just my own personal experience setting up your firewall is also there out of the box as a suggestion then you also have access to their brilliant documentation new features and release notes for that release and if you need help or if you want to donate to the project that's all there in the welcome screen now you'll notice i've already knocked out quite a few extra things that come specific to linux mint another one is the update manager fantastic update manager i've talked at great length about why this is the case but you get clear information about what is being updated and why and you are the one that is in control about what you update and when uh now the reason being is because this is a really uh it's unobtrusive is what i will describe this update manager as basically it will live down here in your system tray with a little orange icon next to it if there are updates available it won't go ahead and automatically install things behind your back and it won't take over control of your system and tell you to restart or anything like that so desktop users freaking love this because they're the ones that are in control and they don't have to worry about their system kicking them out of a session because they want to update now thank you very much so the update manager is one of the best available here on linux really clear information really great control over your system now also in both linux mint desktops you will get a fantastic software sources manager so you can see here in the official repositories as soon as you open up the mirrors section you get two repositories one for mint and one for the ubuntu release that it's based on as soon as you click on those it will give you a speed test as to which repository is going to be fastest for your connection really great features that yes they are involved in other distributions but it just it handles it so intuitively in mint across the board that i really love it also you get quick and easy management of any ppas that you might want to add here and anytime you change any information about your repositories you get a prompt to update your repository i'm not going to do that this time around also if you have any other additional repositories enabled things like the google chrome repository or i don't know microsoft edge or something like that they'll all be listed here and you can add them or remove them as necessary you've got a quick place to store all your authentication keys for those repositories and you have a quick access to some common fixes for problems that you might have with your package management so all this is all tied up in one neat little package which is unique to linux mint not necessarily completely absent in other distributions but it's just packaged so well here in mint that it makes for very easy management on the desktop side of things okay we also have system reports the system reports tool is just a really helpful way to be able to see what has gone wrong in your system or if there's been anything that's crashed you can get some information on that makes it a lot easier for bug reporting and also for trying to get fixes to issues that might crop up from time to time this is a quality of life thing that i think the linux mint project overall really benefits from when their users are able to take this and use this tool well it also helps just issues getting diagnosed and that kind of thing another thing that is more or less unique to linux mint is the backup solutions that they have built in so first of all they have personal backups so your personal data that lives inside the home folder in your system can be backed up but also the software selection that you have installed on your system you can in theory back up the the software that is installed on your system and then quickly restore that to another installed linux mint system which is very nice they also have time shift installed by default which helps manage system snapshots so anytime there is an update that comes through you can set this up to take system snapshots whenever it needs to basically you can roll back to a previous snapshot of your system if something breaks during a major update which is really helpful when you're running on the service pack model a few other little custom tools that really do add up to a great user experience is warpinator which they introduced in the last release warpinator is a bit like airdrop for linux mint they also did make some changes to what handles the printing dialogues because the upstream ubuntu 20.04 printer management tool that was chosen wasn't functioning the way that they wanted it to so they've switched it back and it should make hp printers especially work a bit better but hopefully printers across the board also common to both linux or to all the linux mint releases is the new web app tool now i'm a huge fan of this tool i've honestly wished it has been around i wish it had been around for uh for a long time but here we are it's here now i'm grateful so what you can do is you can basically come in here create a web app for any common service that you use on the internet so for example i might want to create one for youtube because i seem to be on there a lot youtube.com and it will bring in a a fave icon for the icon that lives in your menu you can put it in a certain category in your menu which is kind of cool and then you can also dictate which web browser it uses to render in the background you can also enable or disable the navigation bar and now when i go back into my menu you'll see under internet i now have the youtube web app living there and it will start up this web app in a kind of a stripped down version of a web browser with its own uh window title so that i can uh run youtube and have youtube sitting in its own native window uh by itself which is kind of cool and i can uh hit the super key just type youtube and away i go another thing that's very indicative of linux mint's everyday desktop user base is they've also been working on a new live tv app called hypnotics and basically it's just a way that you can watch free to air radio and tv straight from within this really nicely polished app now apparently you can throw in some more uh options here for uh for video on demand type stuff but i honestly have no idea how to do this you have to go in add a new provider with the m3u url and and then it will draw it in but for right now i just have access to all the free iptv tv stations around the world including audio so i can jump in here to australia and have a look at what all is going on in here and it even pulls in some nice logos which is kind of fun all of these it's just a nice little app that linux mint just gives you out of the box that you don't have to go and get all right so that basically covers everything that's unique about linux mint as a distribution now i'm going to talk about what makes the cinnamon desktop unique from mate etc we're here on mate so let's talk about mate first what i have noticed about mate is that mate is kind of like the minimalist desktop in that there is very little modern stuff going on when we think of a modern desktop environment we're thinking about uh quick controls from the panel here we're thinking about notification centers we're thinking about how does it handle multiple monitors and high pixel density displays and all that kind of stuff well unfortunately the long and the short of it is that mate doesn't do a very good job with any of this it's very spartan minimal and if you have a hardware setup that is pretty simple then mate will probably float your boat especially if you're a little bit resource constrained mate tends to be a little lighter on cpu cycles and a little bit lighter on ram not a whole lot lighter but a little bit lighter this desktop does not get in your way at all it is not pestering you about anything and if that appeals to you then you're going to like it you're very constrained with the tools down here on the on the panel in that clicking or right clicking any of these doesn't give you many options at all as you can see as i'm just going through them it's there's barely anything going on here now what i will say is it does seem in stark contrast to ubuntu's mate spin which seems to do a lot more work to bridge the modern desktop paradigm with with notification centers and having indicator applets and all of these newer technologies and bridging them into a very old desktop environment but linux mint mate doesn't seem to take that route in fact i would almost argue that linux mint mate now actually seems less functional on the desktop side of things and less pretty than what it did back in 2012 when it was using when it was using a lot of ubuntu's upstream work things like nice uh translucent notification bubbles and stuff like that it just looks very uh simple spartan and uh functional best thing that linux mate has going for it is this menu the menu has always been the stuff of legend and i'll show you why basically it boils down to this inline search here there are many menus that do inline search for just your application so if i'm looking for let's say the hypnotics tv app that i just showed you before i can just start typing and it'll show up that's nothing new what i like is when you can go through and start typing in a package that you want to install all right so i'm not exactly sure why it's not working for me but usually you can type in a package name and it will actually bring that package up if it recognizes the name of it in the repository it'll give you a quick link to go and install that that's a nice handy little feature obviously it'll give you then desktop search that you can go and search the internet for whatever it is that you've typed into that menu so while this particular menu it doesn't seem to be behaving itself right now if we go into the preferences for the menu we can change things like what appears where and what i will say is that the muscle memory between both mate and cinnamon does seem very similar all the quick links to places and system and that kind of things do seem to be in relatively similar places which does help if you're transitioning from one to the other so there is no fancy effects on this desktop whatsoever and the only uh what you can do however is you can go in and change the window manager which is the default uh which defaults to marco and compton i think it is and you can change it to compiz which gives you a lot more flexibility for fancy animations however comp is were i don't believe is being currently developed anymore um so it's very much uh it's very much an archaic piece of software and stability ranges depending on your hardware and your setup also it doesn't have any fancy panel layouts or even a heads-up display menu like ubuntu mate does now i went ahead and installed mate tweak which is from the ubuntu repositories purpose built for ubuntu mate and you can see that it covers a lot of the same ground as the desktop settings little applet does here you can see the comparison between the two is really really similar however when it comes to again bridging those two worlds between modern and slightly older you can see that mate tweek from ubuntu mate tries to do it tries to scale things up with high pixel density displays where it can it gives you it gives you the quick access to things like enabling the dock the heads-up display menu pull-down terminal that kind of thing and it also gives you panel layouts by default now these panel layouts don't really work here in linux mint mate i don't really know why and i wish that it was i wish you had all the other layouts that ubuntu mate gives you so that is what it is the big one i would definitely point out is if you are on a modern display that has a high resolution you're going to feel it in mate so i would caution against that you can go in and install you can go in and tweak the fonts under appearance i think it is you jump into the appearance settings you go into fonts and then you can change the details of the fonts and the dots per dots per inch and you can throw automatic detection on that and see if that helps you out a little bit apart from that you're kind of stuck with everything being at a hundred percent um i varying results if you go through the mate tweak tool from ubuntu mate and hit that high pixel density display it will try and double the interface scaling but no fractional scaling or anything fancy like that so that is uh linux mint mate in a nutshell you're stuck with pretty old tools that are just being maintained there's not really a whole lot of features being added here so even things that i really value like spacebar previewing doesn't work here yep you're very much stuck with a more traditional 2003 2005-ish kind of interface that is what it is and if you if that's your speed fantastic let's move on to the linux mint cinnamon see what's going on over that neck of the woods so as soon as you boot into this cinnamon desktop you notice that things just feel a little more polished and a little more modern and there's definitely some truth to the the fact that the cinnamon desktop is is having features actively added to it and things changed and updated and tweaked as the development cycle rolls on whereas mate just feels a lot more static so here's what you gain on top of linux mint mate consider everything that all the fundamentals remain the same but here's what you get in addition to that and if this is your speed then this is probably something you're going to like first of all modern hardware is a lot better accommodated so things like multi-monitor setups is a lot easier to configure when you jump into the display settings that are built into cinnamon you have a lot more control over things like the layout and the refresh rates and the user interface scaling and all that kind of thing what i will say is that as of right now cinnamon does not have fractional scaling officially supported however it is being actively worked on and it's not hopefully too far away so that will allow 125 150 175 scaling not just normal and double also they're wanting to make sure that they get this right with multi-monitor support so that in the event that you have a laptop that has a scaled interface let's say you have a laptop that's a 13 inch laptop with a 1080p display and you want to scale it at 125 but you also have an external monitor that's like a 4k monitor and you want to scale that at double well then hopefully once this has been executed you'll be able to get independent display scaling uh when you have an external monitor plugged in which would be fantastic so as you can see they've got the option in the cinnamon settings already fractional scaling and you can choose to turn that on i think i don't exactly know what you need to do to trigger this on but they do give you a warning that it's experimental so hopefully when this feature fully lands it'll be a great place to be now you also get a notification area that when you have notifications that pop up and start filling up the desktop down the bottom here not only do you get a nice smooth transition in and out but notifications will stack up and can be dismissed over time also on cinnamon you do get more coherent theming options so cinnamon obviously being based on gtk 3 as opposed to gtk2 you do get a wider array of themes that are being actively again actively supported and developed when you jump into cinnamon instead of going to a random website and downloading a random archive and applying that to your system you get a built-in themes store which allows you to download and install whatever themes strike your fancy and updates to those themes and stuff usually come through this store as well so simply downloading those and enabling those is so much easier than what it is on mate and i will say that overall the theming here looks cleaner it looks nicer and looks more polished things like windows shadows the borders clean lines all of that kind of stuff makes sense there is a lot of visual consistency between cinnamon and mate but you start noticing underneath the surface that cinnamon has a lot more uh natural it has a much more natural look and feel to it than what mate does in 2021 anyway another really nice touch that i love in the nemo file manager which is the default on on mint is you get the spacebar quick preview it's just a muscle memory thing that i've really grown accustomed to and i love it the system tray overall just seems to be cleaner designed and the overall configurability of the desktop things like uh panels things like desk glitz which is kind of like widgets for your desktop all of these things have more options and more quality options to play with so you can definitely tell that cinnamon feels like the desktop that most users will gravitate towards and and it has the active development behind it compared to mate which definitely seems to be more on maintenance mode however if you don't want to be distracted or you're not a fan of flashy desktops or you have older hardware or you don't like window animations or anything like that then mate is definitely the one for you or if you really value nostalgia so overall linux mint has a lot to offer the desktop user and the fundamentals across xfce mate and cinnamon remain the same i wish they could add a couple more of the features from the mate mint menu into the cinnamon edition that would be cool and for me personally some of the things that still bug me about linux mint are the fact that the firefox the custom version of mozilla firefox that they ship with linux mint comes from their own repository and it has things like a tweaked custom search engine and they definitely lock down the available search engines for you in that when you try to add more search engines from firefox it'll link you through to linux mint so that they can explain that they get revenue share from the search engines that they provide out of the box but it is quite a nightmare to to disable all of this and just get a clean stock version of mozilla firefox as it ships in upstream ubuntu so there is a solution to this in terms of you basically just have to create a preferences file in apt to tell it to ignore the linux mint version of firefox and just install the one from the ubuntu repository so definitely google that if it's something that annoys you another thing that does kind of annoy me but i totally get where they're coming from is the fact that snaps are completely disabled and you cannot install them by default in that if you go to sudo apt install snap d like you would in any other debian based distribution it says that there is no snap d package available it's not really the case again it's just a preference file in the package management system folder that is preventing it from installing snapd so simply removing that that file then allows you to install snaps and and do those to your heart's content now that is a very strategic decision on mint's part i'm not going to comment on that here and now they just saw that in their users best interest it wasn't something that they were going to pursue and that's fine but it's it's not too much of an inconvenience to fix but those are some of the things that that irk me a little bit about linux mint but they're definitely not deal breakers well i think that is about it that is everything that there is to know about linux mint 20.1 both the mate and the cinnamon release let me know if you found this helpful and uh yeah we might do a deep dive on a different desktop environment in the very near future let me know leave some comments down below which desktop i should dive into on a deeper level thank you so much for watching i'll see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 93,358

Rating: 4.9138942 out of 5

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, linux mint 20.1, linux mint cinnamon, mate, linux mint 20.1 review, desktop linux 2021

Id: HeJe6l_fmbE

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021