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+I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear if from the Linux Mint fans.
+How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? And indeed I did hear about it. There's nothing like some guy on the internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year.
+
+But there's a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016: Wayland. 
+
+Wayland is, for better or worse, the future of Linux and will undoubtedly be the big story of 2017 (unless Mir actually ships, in which case it might share the spotlight). What's more once you're used Wayland, at least in my experience, you'll want it everywhere. And only one of the major distros has Wayland today: Fedora.
+
+That doesn't mean that Mint 18.1, which happened to arrive the same day the Fedora article was published, isn't a great release. In fact is it. But it doesn't have Wayland. Nor will it have Wayland until Linux Mint's upstream source, Ubuntu, ships Wayland as part of an LTS release, which is won't happen until at least 2018 when the next LTS release is out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly others) will move to Wayland. 
+
+That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop so to speak, which is an interesting transition for the project given that it started out with a more aggressive development pace, adopting new features and iterating quickly. All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and build off the LTS cycle. 
+
+You might even say that Linux Mint has come of age. It's no longer quite as cutting edge as it once was, which shows itself in some important areas, like the kernel which is only at 4.4 even now. It's also plagued by the same poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but it won't be that way by default, and that more than anything else would prevent me from recommending Mint 18. More on that in a minute.
+
+Mint 18.1 is, however, an LTS release and will be supported until 2021, which is something you won't get from Fedora. 
+
+Although Mint 18.1 builds on the same set of base packages found in the previous release (Linux Mint 18.0), which are based on Ubuntu 16.04, there's still plenty of new stuff in this release to make Mint fans happy. Most of what's new is higher level stuff, the stuff that makes Mint, well, Mint rather than any underlying system changes.
+
+As always Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will releases with other desktops as well, the Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing none of those are out yet.
+
+## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition
+
+Cinnamon has long felt like the flagship desktop for Linux Mint and this release is no exception. Though MATE gets roughly equal billing and, from what I can tell as an outsider, equal development attention, Cinnamon is definitely the flashier, more polished of the two.
+
+Linux Mint 18.1 features Cinnamon 3.2, which is notable for two things that sound rather minor at first glance, but open up quite a few possibilities for third-party developers. The first is that all the various menus and panels no longer have what Mint [calls](https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_serena_cinnamon_whatsnew.php) "box pointers", in other words, the shape of the menus used to "point" to their parent object. In Cinnamon 3.2 that's no longer true. Cinnamon 3.2 also features the ability to dock panels vertically on either (or both) sides of you screen rather than just the top and bottom.
+
+The latter change is immediately useful for anyone working a cramped laptop screen since there's more horizontal space than vertical, provided the panels on the side works with your habits. Eliminating the box pointers is more something that will be interesting down the road since it opens up quite a few more options for theme designers.
+
+Thanks to some underlying upgrades, Cinnamon 3.2 brings back some of its flash by re-enabling cross-fade animations and fade effects for lists. These features had both been disabled in the past couple of release for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custome sound when a notification pops up. There's a new setting in the Sound panel of the System Settings app, head to Sound  and then Sound Effects to find it.
+
+Another very nice features that doesn't seem to get much press in Cinnamon 3.2 is that Bumblebee users can right-click any app in the application menu and launch it with optirun by selecting 'Run with NVIDIA GPU'. That might be the easiest way I've seen to take advantage of the more powerful, but more battery draining graphics only when you really want it, e.g. with your favorite graphics editor or game.
+
+Another bit of hardware support worth noting is that, in addition to synaptics, Cinnamon 3.2 now supports the newer libinput touchpad driver. I've had much better luck with libinput on newer hardware, particularly getting "reverse" scrolling working globally as opposed to globally-except-Chromium, which is what happens if you use a higher level method (Xmodmap for instance) or synaptics. You mileage may vary, but either way it's nice to have the option to use libinput with Cinnamon.
+
+Mint continues to polish its set of default application with this release. The Xed text editor gets a Firefox-style search bar at the bottom of the windows that features find-as-you-type searching. Xed also now has full support for dark themes, notably the optional Mint-Y theme that shipped with Mint 18.0. Mint's video and image viewer apps, Xplayer and Xviewer respectively, also see some improvements like the ability to blank a second monitor when you're watching a video in Xplayer.
+
+The Mint Update Manager remains largely unchanged aside from a couple of tweaks to how kernel update options are displayed (they're not sorted by version and there are recommendations both the most stable and the most secure). 
+
+Linux Mint has taken some flak for how the Update Manager handles kernels in the past and while things are better in the 18.x line the default settings still leave much to be desired. Mint users tend to get defensive about this point because Mint has gone to all the trouble to build its own Update Manager (which is very nice, I've praised it in the past, particularly for pulling in the changelogs for every available kernel) but, nice as it is, an update manager becomes counter productive if it doesn't keep users up-to-date, particularly kernel level security updates.
+
+In Mint 18, Mint began including an intro screen that comes up when you first launch Update Manager.  Mint will ask you which settings you want to use for updates. The options are "don't break my computer", "optimize stability and security" and "always update everything". By default the middle option is selected. Each of those options has some additional information, including a recommendation which is, in the same order, "for novice users", "for most users", and "for advanced users".
+
+I didn't call this out in the last review, but it deserves it because frankly, this is a load of crap.
+
+Labeling a setting "don't break my computer" is a disservice to novice users and out of place with the rest of Mint. If Mint really can't provide a stable up-to-date system without blocking upstream updates I would suggest everyone stop using it forthwith. The thing is Mint *can* provide that, it's just made some very poor UI decisions in its Update Manager that lead to novice users ending up with a less secure system than they would have if Mint just punted and used GNOME Software. And that's a problem that has earned Mint a good bit of well deserved flak over the years. 
+
+Sure, Mint can be just as secure as any other distro, I haven't seen anyone argue otherwise. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to via poorly chosen defaults and user interface decisions. If "always update everything", including the kernel, really does break your system, I'd suggest you step back and give some thought to what that says about your distro. 
+
+In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint.
+
+It's worth noting here that when I say update your kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent to much time with Arch and have been using brand new hardware a lot, but I'd hesitate to use anything less than 4.8 at this point, particularly if you have a Skylake chip. Fortunately 4.8 is available for Mint, though here you may well want to heed Mint's various scary sounding warnings since updating between kernel point releases can cause problems. Especially if you distro hasn't expressibly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not. 
+
+In fact, while Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about any testing that might have been done. Is it there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out and Mint has mirrored that update? There's no information provided to answer that question.
+
+Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is be the canary in a coal mine so you don't have to I went ahead and updated the kernel to 4.8 and... nothing bad happened. For the record I do the majority of my testing on a Lenovo x240 i5. I always start with a virtual machine install and then also install it on actual hardware using a separate partition from my main OS installation.
+
+## MATE
+
+Linux Mint MATE edition 
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? For me, in a word, no. Mint 18.1 makes a good update to the 18.x line, but it lacks anything compelling and the dissappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who know how to update their software from the command line.
+
+That said, MATE continues to be an impressive effort and I enjoy it atop other distros, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin.