From 715e2d09eac8f31b37aca8023b252362a731ce5e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Sat, 6 May 2017 16:59:20 -0500 Subject: archived published and added ubuntu review --- mint181review.html | 62 ----------------- mint181review.txt | 95 ------------------------- published/mint181-desktop.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-kernel-update.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-mate.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-search.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-update-warning.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-update.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181-vert-panel.png | Bin 0 -> 6232011 bytes published/mint181/mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg | Bin 0 -> 50793 bytes published/mint181/mint181-kernel-update.jpg | Bin 0 -> 153452 bytes published/mint181/mint181-mate-desktop.jpg | Bin 0 -> 110276 bytes published/mint181/mint181-search.jpg | Bin 0 -> 174067 bytes published/mint181/mint181-update-warning.jpg | Bin 0 -> 152506 bytes published/mint181/mint181-update.jpg | Bin 0 -> 187173 bytes published/mint181/mint181-vert-panel.jpg | Bin 0 -> 197902 bytes published/mint181review.html | 62 +++++++++++++++++ published/mint181review.txt | 95 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ ubuntu1704review.html | 58 ++++++++++++++++ ubuntu1704review.txt | 99 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 20 files changed, 314 insertions(+), 157 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 mint181review.html delete mode 100644 mint181review.txt create mode 100644 published/mint181-desktop.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-kernel-update.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-mate.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-search.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-update-warning.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-update.png create mode 100644 published/mint181-vert-panel.png create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-kernel-update.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-mate-desktop.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-search.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-update-warning.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-update.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181/mint181-vert-panel.jpg create mode 100644 published/mint181review.html create mode 100644 published/mint181review.txt create mode 100644 ubuntu1704review.html create mode 100644 ubuntu1704review.txt diff --git a/mint181review.html b/mint181review.html deleted file mode 100644 index 29be2d7..0000000 --- a/mint181review.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ -

I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.

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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 I digress.

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There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is Wayland.

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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.

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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. 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 won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away).

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That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, 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.

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All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and build off the LTS cycle. Mint is 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 still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro.

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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.

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As always Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will be releases with other desktops as well, the Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing none of those are out yet.

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Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

- -[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] - -

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.

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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 "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 your screen rather than just the top and bottom.

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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.

- -[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] - -

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 releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom 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.

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There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint.

- -[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] - -

Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, 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. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful.

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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.

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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.

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The Mint Update Manager remains largely unchanged aside from a couple of tweaks to how kernel update options are displayed (they're now sorted by version and there are recommendations for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed.

- -[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] - -

While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. 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 linking to 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.

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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".

- -[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] - -

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" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge 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 has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system.

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Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages.

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If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of.

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It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too 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 with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't explicitly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not.

- -[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] - -

While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint.

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Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to 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. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch.

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MATE

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Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option.

- -[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] - -

This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE.

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MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference.

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MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well.

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If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice.

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Conclusion

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Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? For me, in a word, no.

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Mint 18.1 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you.

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Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin.

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In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line.

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One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade?

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That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021.

diff --git a/mint181review.txt b/mint181review.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a709bfa..0000000 --- a/mint181review.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ -I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from 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 I digress. - -There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is 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. 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 won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away). - -That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, 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. Mint is 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 still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro. - -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 be 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 - -[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] - -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 your 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. - -[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] - -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 releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom 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. - -There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint. - -[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] - -Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, 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. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful. - -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 for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed. - -[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] - -While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. 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 linking to 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". - -[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] - -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" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge 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 has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system. - -Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages. - -If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of. - -It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too 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 with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't expressibly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not. - -[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] - -While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint. - -Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to 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. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch. - -## MATE - -Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option. - -[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] - -This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE. - -MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference. - -MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well. - -If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice. - -## 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 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you. - -Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin. - -In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line. - -One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade? - -That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021. diff --git a/published/mint181-desktop.png b/published/mint181-desktop.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3482e69 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-desktop.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-kernel-update.png b/published/mint181-kernel-update.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6f6acba Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-kernel-update.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-mate.png b/published/mint181-mate.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d724462 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-mate.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-search.png b/published/mint181-search.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0dd8ee8 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-search.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-update-warning.png b/published/mint181-update-warning.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..57bb89d Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-update-warning.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-update.png b/published/mint181-update.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea8f59e Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-update.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181-vert-panel.png b/published/mint181-vert-panel.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f5d0ba7 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181-vert-panel.png differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ab3e83a Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-kernel-update.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-kernel-update.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..85aefc1 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-kernel-update.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-mate-desktop.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-mate-desktop.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b01b41f Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-mate-desktop.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-search.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-search.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f16688 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-search.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-update-warning.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-update-warning.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..98527e9 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-update-warning.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-update.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-update.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4856372 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-update.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181/mint181-vert-panel.jpg b/published/mint181/mint181-vert-panel.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f1f376 Binary files /dev/null and b/published/mint181/mint181-vert-panel.jpg differ diff --git a/published/mint181review.html b/published/mint181review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29be2d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/mint181review.html @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +

I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from 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 I digress.

+

There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is 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. 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 won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away).

+

That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, 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. Mint is 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 still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro.

+

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 be 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

+ +[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] + +

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 "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 your 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.

+ +[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] + +

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 releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom 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.

+

There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint.

+ +[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] + +

Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, 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. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful.

+

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 now sorted by version and there are recommendations for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed.

+ +[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] + +

While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. 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 linking to 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".

+ +[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] + +

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" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge 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 has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system.

+

Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages.

+

If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of.

+

It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too 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 with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't explicitly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not.

+ +[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] + +

While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint.

+

Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to 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. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch.

+

MATE

+

Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option.

+ +[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] + +

This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE.

+

MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference.

+

MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well.

+

If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice.

+

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 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you.

+

Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin.

+

In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line.

+

One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade?

+

That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021.

diff --git a/published/mint181review.txt b/published/mint181review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a709bfa --- /dev/null +++ b/published/mint181review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from 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 I digress. + +There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016 and I didn't even have to wait to test it. The reason is 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. 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 won't happen until at least 2018 when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland (and even then it may not happen right away). + +That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward, 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. Mint is 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 still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users, especially inexperienced users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro. + +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 be 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 + +[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"] + +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 your 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. + +[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."] + +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 releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom 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. + +There's also quite a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while, but rarely get mentioned. For example I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but of course within Mint there's no Xed app, it's called "Text Editor". Still, open the main menu and search for Xed and the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop" or Appearance or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember that, type "Desktop" and the top hit is "Background", which, as it happens, is the name of the app that changes backgrounds. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small, but common problems is a big part of why users love Mint. + +[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."] + +Another very nice feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2, but doesn't seem to get much press, 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. Again, a very small feature, but one that's extremely useful. + +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 for both the most stable and the most secure). There's also a new column showing the source of updates, whether its Mint, upstream Ubuntu or any third-party repos you've installed. + +[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."] + +While 99 percent of my experience with Linux Mint has been positive, I find that the Update Manager is one place it falls on its face. 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 linking to 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". + +[image="mint181-update-warning.jpg" caption="Labeling something 'don't break my computer' implies that other options will break my computer and almost guarantees new users will opt for the top choice."] + +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" implies that the other options will break your computer which is almost guaranteed to scare a new users into choosing that option. That's a huge 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 has just made some poor UI decisions in its Update Manager which may mislead novice users, causing them to end up with a less secure system. + +Mint can be just as secure as any other distro. The problem is that it actively encourages users not to value security via poorly chosen defaults and user interface messages. + +If the "always update everything" option, including the kernel, really does break Mint, I'd suggest maybe Mint needs to step back and give some thought to what that says about it. In my experience though, using this setting has never caused me any problems with Mint and it should be the default setting just as it is in every other distro I'm aware of. + +It's worth noting here that when I say update the kernel I mean the current point release of the kernel, not major point updates. For Mint 18.1 that means kernel 4.4.x, which frankly, feels terribly out of date. It could be that I've spent too 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 with your system -- especially if your distro hasn't expressibly confirmed that everything works, which, as far as I can tell Mint has not. + +[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"] + +While Mint's Update Manager offers quite a bit of detail about all the various kernels available it's frustratingly vague about whether or not a given kernel has been tested, especially in light of all the scare-tactic warnings your get when from the UI. Is kernel 4.8 there because it works just fine with Mint 18.1 and I can upgrade to it? Or is 4.8 there simply because upstream Ubuntu has pushed it out for Ubuntu users and Mint is picking it up? So far as I can tell there's no information provided to answer that question. Unlike the Update Manager, the window listing available kernel updates doesn't used the colored, 1-5 stability ranking system and beyond linking to the changelogs (a nice features to be sure) there's no indication of what's been tested and what hasn't. The only information provided is that 4.4.0-53 is recommended for stability and the more recent 4.4.0-57 is recommended if you care about security. Again, security and stability are apparently at odds in Linux Mint. + +Since at least part of the point of reviewing a distro is to 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. In other words I don't have any hardware that's likely to affected by jumping a few kernel point releases, your experience may be very different and I strongly suggest doing your research and testing in virtual machine before you update your kernel in Mint. Honestly, if you have to do all that on your own, you may as well run Arch. + +## MATE + +Linux Mint MATE edition started live as a kind of GNOME 2.x clone, but has since morphed and evolved into a desktop that sits somewhere between the old GNOME and Xfce. It's relatively lightweight, but it's not militant about its minimalism. If you've got older hardware it makes a great option. + +[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"] + +This release sees MATE updated to version 1.16, which is chiefly notable for bringing quite a few more GTK+ 3 components. The session manager, terminal, notifications and policykit library are all now GTK+ 3. That means MATE now relies on the cairo drawing library throughout and themes can take advantage of the simpler CSS-based theming tools without worrying as much about the non-GTK+ 3 elements in MATE. + +MATE 1.6 sees a couple of other changes in the main Menu, notably some improvements to the search features. The Google custom search engine option has been replaced with DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches are now localized and will send you to the Wikipedia domain for your language. Online search options can of course be disabled in the preference. + +MATE also gets the same set of X-apps updates mentioned in the Cinnamon section and one other change I did not mention up there -- Rhythmbox replaces Banshee as the default music player. That means no more relying on the half-broken, tangled mess of code that is mono just to play some music. The Update Manager in Linux Mint MATE is the same as well, so everything that applies to the Cinnamon release applies here as well. + +If that sounds like nothing much is new in MATE 1.16, well you're sort of right. I consider that a good thing. MATE has been a stable, lightweight desktop that does what a desktop needs to do and gets out of the way the rest of the time for quite a few releases now. There are of course lighter weight options, but MATE does a nice job of finding the midpoint between bare bones and bloat. The move to GTK+ 3 won't be noticed by most, but it cleans up some of the last rough edges I've found in MATE. If you're looking for a desktop that just works, is easy on your processor, graphics and RAM, MATE makes an excellent choice. + +## 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 Cinnamon continues to refine the traditional desktop UI model and makes an easy transition path for Windows refugees than Unity or GNOME Shell. But I'd still probably suggest running Cinnamon atop another distro. The Update Manager mars the experience of Mint and is too critical a part of the what makes a good distro to gloss over. If you're comfortable taking charge of updates yourself or just don't care about security all that much then it probably won't bother you. + +Likewise MATE continues to be an impressive effort, but I enjoy it atop other distros much more than Mint, particularly both Ubuntu MATE and the Fedora MATE spin. + +In the end Mint 18.1 lacks any compelling, must-have updates and the disappointing defaults for the Update Manager would stop me from installing Mint for anyone but experienced users who are comfortable updating their software from the command line. + +One of the things I have always liked about Mint is creator Clément Lefebvre's take up upgrading. Too many Linux users seem to be a hurry to update to the latest and greatest, Lefebvre's take is refreshing: if your system is working the way you want, are sure you want to upgrade? + +That might seem at oods with my gripes about the Update Manager, but it's not. Security updates and bug fix updates are always welcome, but an entire distro update can be a huge undertaking and is not without risk. If it ain't broke... With that in mind, I would say that moving from Mint 18.0 to 18.1 is probably not worth it if 18.0 is working well. Both are long term support releases and will be supported until 2021. diff --git a/ubuntu1704review.html b/ubuntu1704review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1411ab --- /dev/null +++ b/ubuntu1704review.html @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +

Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop.

+

Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning.

+

Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead.

+

Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases.

+

In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."

+

So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year.

+

That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021).

+

What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it.

+

That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME.

+

It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04.

+

Ubuntu 17.04

+

There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers.

+

Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself.

+

Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with).

+

This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example).

+

Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] + +

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04

+

Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu.

+

Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] + +

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works.

+

GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems).

+

Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version.

+

One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] + +

The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love.

+

Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges).

+

GNOME for Unity Refugees

+

So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better.

+ +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] + +

Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME.

+

This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste.

+

While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters.

+

Fortunately for Unity refugees there's Plotinus, which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes.

+

Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps.

+

Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back.

+

As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, no minimize for you!). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too.

+

[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."]

+

Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser.

+

Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better.

+

Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface. On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look.

+

Other 'buntus

+

There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint.

+

Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian.

+

There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different.

+

My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with.

+

Conclusion

+

While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own.

+

It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing.

diff --git a/ubuntu1704review.txt b/ubuntu1704review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcaf45e --- /dev/null +++ b/ubuntu1704review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.04, an update to its flagship Unity-based Linux desktop. + +Ubuntu 17.04 offers a few new features, bug fixes and improvements over its predecessor, but it's also a significant release because it will likely be the last version of Unity that Canonical ships. Technically there is Ubuntu 17.10 coming later this year, but it seems unlikely the company is going to put much effort into developing a desktop it is abandoning. + +Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to its homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical recently announced it was abandoning work on Unity and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME with next year's 18.04 LTS release. The company is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence", as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, is dead. + +Shuttleworth posted that news just a few days before Ubuntu 17.04 arrived, which took a considerable amount of wind out of Ubuntu 17.04's sails, though, to be fair, the last few Ubuntu desktop releases have not had much wind in their sails to start with. There have been a few feature updates, some work on bringing in more up-to-date GNOME and GTK elements, but by and large they've been maintenance releases. + +In fact Ubuntu's twice yearly update schedule has lately felt more like a burden the company has to deal with while the real work of building Unity 8 happened in between. And Unity 8 did indeed look promising, unfortunately it's not something that mobile carriers and phone makers seemed to want. As Shuttleworth writes in his announcement, "what the Unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear." + +So Unity 8 is going the way of the Dodo which leaves the Unity-based default version of Ubuntu 17.04 as a kind of living fossil. The Ubuntu GNOME project will be the default release of Ubuntu this time next year. + +That's not to say that 17.04 is abandonware. In fact there are improvements, even a couple new features. And it will live on in the Universe repos for anyone who'd like to continue using it. If you're fond of the Unity interface there's no need to panic just yet, you'll be able to continue using it for quite a while. There have already been stirrings of a community around it that would like to continue development. Even if there are just a couple of people fixing bugs and keeping the lights on you should be able to get a good five more years out of it (Canonical is committed to maintaining for the five year release cycle of 16.04, which lasts until April of 2021). + +What makes Shuttleworth's announcement a little odd is that Unity 7 is a very mature and stable desktop. Why not stick with Unity 7? Why move to GNOME? The answer seems to lie in how Canonical is allocating resources. Canonical doesn't want to employ an army of programmers to keep Unity 7 secure and improving when the GNOME project is available for free with an army of programmers not paid by Canonical maintaining and improving it. + +That means the future of Ubuntu then looks a lot like the future of, well, any other distro that uses GNOME by default. That's a little disappointing, especially if you, like me, happened to really want an Ubuntu phone. On the other hand I have fond memories of pre-Unity Ubuntu which of course also used a more or less stock version of GNOME. + +It's also worth noting that there are several other 'buntu flavors out there for anyone who doesn't want to use GNOME. I'll take a look at two of them -- Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu -- below, along with the future of Ubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, but first here's what's new in Ubuntu 17.04. + +## Ubuntu 17.04 + +There's more to a distro than its default desktop and Ubuntu 17.04 is no exception. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, but possibly the best news is that Ubuntu is now using Linux kernel 4.10. That means your Kaby Lake processors are fully supported (as are AMD Ryzen chips for those that love rooting for the underdog). There's also some support for NVIDIA's Tegra P1 and some improvements to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers. + +Another big change that most people will never even notice is that Ubuntu 17.04 switched from a swap partition to a swap file. You could see some speed improvements from that in some situations -- and it makes your swap partition unnecessary, which saves a step in the installation process. The exception here is Btrfs, which does not support swap files. If you're using Btrfs you'll need to opt for manual partitioning and create a swap partition yourself. + +Also worth mentioning is Ubuntu 17.04's support for the new "driverless" printers. These printers use the [IPP Everywhere](http://www.pwg.org/dynamo/eveprinters.php) and Apple [AirPrint](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311) protocols and connecting them to your Ubuntu desktop should be, in Canonical's words "as easy as connecting a USB stick" (I don't have a printer to test with). + +This release also sees the usual slew of application updates for Ubuntu's stock apps. GNOME-based apps have mostly been updated to GNOME 3.24, though there are a few that linger at older versions (Terminal and Nautilus for example). + +Updates to Unity 7 include... well, nothing really. Unity is dead, long live GNOME. + +[image="ubuntu1704-unity7.jpg" caption="The good old Unity desktop is no more."] + +## Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 + +Shortly after Shuttleworth announced Unity 8 and accompaniments were dead and Ubuntu was returning to a stock GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu GNOME team posted a note saying "that there will no longer be a separate GNOME flavor of Ubuntu". Instead the development teams from both Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Desktop will be merging. The "flavor" itself will be merged into mainline Ubuntu and, starting with 17.10, if you update Ubuntu GNOME you'll actually be sideways updating to just Ubuntu. + +Shuttleworth's announcement says that Ubuntu will be making minimal customizations to the GNOME interface and since the Ubuntu GNOME project currently makes very few customizations it seems reasonable to assume that today's Ubuntu GNOME is not too far off tomorrow's Ubuntu. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-base.jpg" caption="The basic GNOME shell look in Ubuntu GNOME 17.04."] + +Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 uses GNOME 3.24, having leapfrogged over 3.22 from 3.20. There's quite a bit of new stuff in this release, including a built-in new feature called Night Light which automatically changes your monitor color to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen at night. Night Light is GNOME's version of RedShift or f.lux, but, because it was developed by GNOME it actually works with Wayland, whereas the others do not. As someone who spends most of their time in front a screen at night this is reason enough alone for me to switch to GNOME. And I'm happy to report that it just works. + +GNOME's Calendar app gets a much-requested Week view with this release, though it still lacks support for a broader range of calendars (if you use Google Calendar it works fine, everything else has caused me problems). + +Like the Unity desktop the Ubuntu GNOME devs has stuck with older versions of some apps, including Terminal, Nautilus (both at GNOME 3.20 versions) and Evolution, which remains (for stability, say the release notes) at the GNOME 3.22 version. + +One thing that's not going away with Unity 8 is Snap packages. A "snap" package is designed to work across distros and is already widely support (Canonical says 10 distros support Snaps as of this writing). Snaps offer sandboxing for improved security and quicker updates (since they come direct from the developer, rather than via the package manager). Because there can never be just one version of something in the Linux world there are also Flatpaks. Roughly the same as Snaps, though they differ considerably in implementation) Flatpaks are also cross distro and support for them in GNOME Software has improved quite a bit in this release and support is installed by default. So with Ubuntu GNOME you can easily install both Snaps and Flatpaks. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-software.jpg" caption="The GNOME Software app should be reasonably familiar for Unity users."] + +The Software app (still at GNOME 3.22) also now supports installing GNOME Shell extensions, which, if you're hoping to replicate the experience of Unity 7 in GNOME, you're going to need to learn to love. + +Ubuntu GNOME does not ship with the full compliment of GNOME apps and I would expect Ubuntu to follow this since apps like Brasero, Evolution and Seahorse are of limited audience at this point. The only possible exception is Evolution since Thunderbird comes up short in some scenarios. All three apps are of course available for install via the Software app. Likewise there are a couple of new GNOME apps that aren't installed by default -- like the brand new GNOME Recipes app and GNOME Games -- but they are in the repos if you'd like to try them out (Recipes is still very rough around the edges). + +## GNOME for Unity Refugees + +So you like Unity but you want to stick with what Canonical uses by default. That means you'll be switching to GNOME 3. Unity was based on and uses quite a few components straight out of GNOME so it's not like you're diving into a whole new world, but, that said, there are things you will miss, things you'll need to work around and several things you might like better. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-unity.jpg" caption="GNOME shell looking a bit like Unity (achieved via this script on GitHub"] + +Let's start with the last part. In my experience, on my testing hardware, which consists of a Lenovo x240 and a Dell Precision 7520, GNOME Shell is faster than Unity. Particularly for common tasks like calling up the search interface, but also in other areas like launching apps and dragging windows. Neither is what I would call slow, but with Unity I sometimes notice a half-second hesitation before and animation starts, which I never notice with GNOME. + +This is highly subjective of course but I like GNOME's search interface and sidebar components better because they get out of the way and then come up when I want them. You can set the Unity sidebar to hide and show only when you want it, but it's still not as smooth as what GNOME offers. Again though, this is largely a matter of taste. + +While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest ripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. There may be some way of setting custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME, but if I have to customize every keyboard shortcut then I might as well go with something far lighter weight and truly customizable like Openbox. What I liked about Unity wasn't even the shortcuts necessarily but the HUD that would find commands within menus simply by searching a few letters. + +Fortunately for Unity refugees there's [Plotinus](https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus), which more or less replicates the Unity HUD UI in GNOME. The problem is it's not simple to install and it's low level enough that there may be some serious potential problems and conflicts (to be fair, there have not been any so far in my testing). Once you get it installed though it's a great extension and useful enough that System76 plans to roll it into future builds of Ubuntu that ship with System76 machines. That solves one potential pain point for switching, but the other is more difficult -- Unity Scopes. + +Unity Scopes were like little search engines for the Dash search feature. They got a lot of bad press, some of it from me, for including an Amazon search scope with affiliate links, but in spite of that gaff they were a fantastically useful feature. I have yet to find the equivalent for GNOME. GNOME ostensibly has the same feature, though in GNOME they're called Search Providers, the problem is that the UI is nowhere near as useful as Unity's UI. Unity allowed you to interact with items in Scopes without opening any apps (how much varied by Scope), in GNOME you generally just use them to find things and launch apps. + +Those are probably the two things you'll miss the most moving from Unity to GNOME. And with a little bit of effort installing Plotinus and tracking down some GNOME Search Providers you can get about 90 percent of what you had in Unity back. + +As for the things that kind of suck about GNOME that you might want to work around, my top pick would be the huge toolbars at the top of every window. I'm convinced that no GNOME dev has ever used GNOME on anything smaller than a 24in monitor (I'm also pretty sure they all look and talk just like Seinfeld's soup Nazi, *no minimize for you!*). If they had they'd realize what a space wasting horror GNOME toolbars are. But then I generally configure Openbox to have no toolbars and move windows with keyboard shortcuts so perhaps I'm just weird. Whatever the case, if you use a laptop with limited vertical space it's possible GNOME's toolbars will drive you crazy too. + +[image="ubuntu1704-gnome-toolbar.jpg" caption="Of course what I want when I'm in "full screen" mode is a giant useless menu bar. There is an extension that will get rid of it in full screen mode, but this is the default."] + +Then there's GNOME Files. There's a reason Ubuntu uses older, heavily patched versions of Files and I believe it's because Ubuntu wanted to ship a file browser that was actually useful. Currently Ubuntu GNOME also uses this patched version of Files so I'm hopeful that will continue going forward. Otherwise you might try Nemo or Thunar or some other file browser. + +Oh and like every computer user on earth save those using stock GNOME you might like minimize and maximize buttons, Ubuntu GNOME (and one hope, Ubuntu 18.04) ships with GNOME tweak tool installed. Open it up, select the Window menu item and turn on min and max buttons. Ah, so much better. + +Here's the bottom line Unity refugees: The transition to GNOME will have some bumps, you'll probably spend some quality to with Google and the Ask Ubuntu site, but in the end you'll probably be able to get GNOME to work in a way that doesn't drive you crazy. Heck, there are even GNOME themes that [pretty closely match the Unity 7 interface](https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1174889). On the outside chance that you just don't mesh with GNOME though, there are alternatives in the Ubuntu stable that are worth a look. + +## Other 'buntus + +There are quite a few "flavors" of Ubuntu, basically one for every common desktop out there. The two I've used the most are Xubuntu and Ubuntu MATE, which use the Xfce and MATE desktops respectively. They're both well worth a look, especially Ubuntu MATE, which for my money does MATE even better than Linux Mint. + +Xubuntu offers one of the best looking default Xfce desktops around and if you want to go back to more traditional, task bar-based workflow it, along with MATE, are your best bets. One thing to note, while Xfce is a bit lighter than say GNOME, the Xubuntu implementation is not the lightest version around. It comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but at the cost of significantly more RAM use than a more minimalist version of Xfce like you'd get, for example, with Debian. + +There's also a relative newcomer, Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on the Budgie desktop, the default desktop of the relatively new Solus distro. I haven't tested Ubuntu Budgie in anything other than a virtual machine, but it did just fine in Virutalbox and might be worth a look if you want something totally different. + +My favorite 'buntu is actually not even an official "flavor", I prefer the minimal Ubuntu iso, which functions just like the Debian minimal CD (and is probably built from it). It's a bare system without even Xorg. From there I can install just what I need and nothing else. For me that means Openbox, dmenu and tint2 along with Xorg and my applications. If you want to go minimal it's worth experimenting with. + +## Conclusion + +While it's a shame that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence, with a single device that behaves like a phone in your hand and desktop when hooked up to a monitor, is not going to see the light. I think it would have been fantastic, but it's not going to happen. Unity 8 is never going to happen. Mir is never going to happen. Ubuntu will likely be just fine even without a solid desktop of its own. + +It's certainly possible that Ubuntu is going to go the way of Red Hat, catering to the needs of its large corporate customers rather than those of us who use the desktop, but so far I don't see evidence to support that prediction. Ubuntu has used stock GNOME in the past and will do so again in the future, beyond that it doesn't sound like a lot is going to change and that's good thing. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2