added mint review and free software piece

4 files changed, 182 insertions, 12 deletions

diff --git a/free-software-notes.txt b/free-software-notes.txt
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+The differences in the license: "My sense is that it's not philosophical... we're going to iterate until we get it right."
+
+There has been only one official release of the license, "We've been continually evolving the license, updating the language" 
+
+Monitizing open source with support contracts has never been a great business model". Critics of this statement might point to Red Hat, but then for every Red Hat there are countless examples of those for whom this model did not work out. Ever heard of Yellow Dog linux?
+
+On why the SSPL: "I think we can do better... I want to see more investment in open source products. VC's intesting in open source products. 
+
+On other's with MongoDB's model: "MongoDB is unique. I would like us to not be unique."
+
+Legally the AGPL covers us, but the SSPL clarifies that in language that will hopefully discourage the bad actors.
+
+Did you know about AWS DocumentDB before the license change. At first he said no comment, then he said no we did not. But if it wasn't Amazon, it would be someone.
diff --git a/free-software.txt b/free-software.txt
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+++ b/free-software.txt
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Bruce Perens:
+
+In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today.
+
+Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source.
+
+Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer.
+
+The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient?
+
+
+Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software.
+
+
+---
+
+Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless. 
+
+There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given. 
+
+Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built.
+
+That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software.
+
+
+
+This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned. 
+
+The notion that free softwareo
+
+The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.”
+
+We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option.
+
+
+
+
+“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights”
+
+In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”:
+“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one”
+
+It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece
+
+
+There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said:
+“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights”
+
+In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”:
+“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one”
+
+It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece
+
+
+In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects
+of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though
+in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other
+words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also
+help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be
+seen as a commons in itself. 
diff --git a/linux-mint191-review.txt b/linux-mint191-review.txt
index f560a39..f02660a 100644
--- a/linux-mint191-review.txt
+++ b/linux-mint191-review.txt
@@ -1,28 +1,78 @@
-Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed a lot of headlines last year. Between IBM bought Red Hat. Canonical launching its biggest Long Term Support update in a long while, moving back to GNOME, but Linux Mint, once a darling of the tech press, had fairly quiet year. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.
+While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.
 
-While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud", it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.
+While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud", it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.
 
-There's a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn't innovating, it isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm", or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. It's just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediate comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.
+There's a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm", or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. It's just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.
 
-It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you're happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.
+It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you're happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.
 
-The project recently release version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint's main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but in was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but its not officially supported by Mint.
+The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint's main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it's not officially supported by Linux Mint.
 
 ## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition
 
-Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. 
+Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It's been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn't seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.
 
-For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon gets a new look. Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. The changes are part of the upgrade to Cinnamon 4.0, which has a slightly task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over 
+That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon has an optional new "modern" look.
 
+[image="linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's new look in Linux Mint 19.1"]
 
+Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you'll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.
 
-Linux Mint 19.1 is also a long term support release (LTS). It will get critical updates and fixes from release until 2023.
+The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.
 
-Linux Mint 19.1 Beta Features
-Linux Mint 19.1 features a raft of notable improvements, but few major new features (save for its new desktop layout, which we’ll get to in a second).
+[image="linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's old look in Linux Mint 19.1 -- that familiar look is just a click away."]
 
-The Nemo file manager is 3x faster than before thanks, Mint say, to code optimisations, and picks up the ability to toggle thumbnails on or off on a per-directory basis.
+I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled "First Steps" and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it's emblematic of Linux Mint's approach to change -- give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new "modern" theme better.
+
+[image="linuxmint191-welcome.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine."]
+
+As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I'd argue that's a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don't have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I've used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I'm used to, particularly dragging windows around.
+
+Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There's a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it -- so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.
+
+Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint's Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.
+
+Mint's Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint's Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. 
+
+Linux Mint's Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you'd have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately -- certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.
+
+To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):
+
+[image="linuxmint191-contast.png" caption="Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint)."]
+.
+
+## Linux Mint MATE Edition
+
+It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that's still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there's an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE. 
+
+[image="linuxmint191-mate.jpg" caption="The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"]
+
+The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).
+
+One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the "First Steps" section of Mint's welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.
+
+While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It's that good. 
+
+The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint's built-in backup tool. It's prominently featured at the top of the "First Steps" section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It's dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you've got your backup location set, just click okay and you're done. 
+
+[image="linuxmint191-backups.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift."]
+
+If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It's been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don't discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.
+
+## Linux Mint Xfce Edition
+
+I'll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level -- for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes -- are part of the Xfce release as well.
+
+[image="linuxmint191-xfce.jpg" caption="The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"]
+
+Outside of Mint's tools though there's not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that's still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.
 
 ## Conclusion
 
-The project also added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer no to use paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project.
+As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you'll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.
+
+Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it's relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there's really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).
+
+Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project.
+
+It's also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it's really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I'm not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.
diff --git a/linuxmint191-review.html b/linuxmint191-review.html
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+<p>While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.</p>
+<p>While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn’t anyone’s top pick for “the cloud”, it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I’ll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.</p>
+<p>There’s a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn’t “changing the desktop computer paradigm”, or “innovating” in “groundbreaking” ways. It’s just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you’ve used, which is to say you’ll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.</p>
+<p>It’s worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you’re happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven’t tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you’re dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.</p>
+<p>The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint’s main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn’t work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it’s not officially supported by Linux Mint.</p>
+<h2 id="linux-mint-cinnamon-edition">Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition</h2>
+<p>Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It’s been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn’t seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.</p>
+<p>That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed “Tessa”, Cinnamon has an optional new “modern” look.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s new look in Linux Mint 19.1”]
+<p>Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you’ll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.</p>
+<p>The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s old look in Linux Mint 19.1 – that familiar look is just a click away.”]
+<p>I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled “First Steps” and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it’s emblematic of Linux Mint’s approach to change – give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new “modern” theme better.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-welcome.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine.”]
+<p>As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I’d argue that’s a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don’t have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I’ve used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I’m used to, particularly dragging windows around.</p>
+<p>Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There’s a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it – so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.</p>
+<p>Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint’s Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.</p>
+<p>Mint’s Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint’s Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.</p>
+<p>Linux Mint’s Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you’d have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately – certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.</p>
+<p>To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-contast.png” caption=“Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint).”]
+<h2 id="linux-mint-mate-edition">Linux Mint MATE Edition</h2>
+<p>It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that’s still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there’s an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-mate.jpg” caption=“The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”]
+<p>The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).</p>
+<p>One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the “First Steps” section of Mint’s welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.</p>
+<p>While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It’s that good.</p>
+<p>The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint’s built-in backup tool. It’s prominently featured at the top of the “First Steps” section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It’s dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you’ve got your backup location set, just click okay and you’re done.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-backups.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift.”]
+<p>If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It’s been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don’t discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.</p>
+<h2 id="linux-mint-xfce-edition">Linux Mint Xfce Edition</h2>
+<p>I’ll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level – for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes – are part of the Xfce release as well.</p>
+[image=“linuxmint191-xfce.jpg” caption=“The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”]
+<p>Outside of Mint’s tools though there’s not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that’s still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.</p>
+<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
+<p>As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you’ll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.</p>
+<p>Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it’s relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there’s really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).</p>
+<p>Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint">Patreon page</a> to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint’s Timeshift project.</p>
+<p>It’s also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it’s really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I’m not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.</p>