From fcd0c003e71675c1e9617ff1ab6d3cbb19023888 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Sat, 4 May 2019 06:37:44 -0500 Subject: added Opera review --- dellxps-review.hmlt | 0 linux-mint191-review.txt | 78 ------------------------------- linuxmint191-review.html | 39 ---------------- opera-reborn3.txt | 95 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ published/linux-mint191-review.txt | 78 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ published/linuxmint191-review.html | 39 ++++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 212 insertions(+), 117 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 dellxps-review.hmlt delete mode 100644 linux-mint191-review.txt delete mode 100644 linuxmint191-review.html create mode 100644 published/linux-mint191-review.txt create mode 100644 published/linuxmint191-review.html diff --git a/dellxps-review.hmlt b/dellxps-review.hmlt deleted file mode 100644 index e69de29..0000000 diff --git a/linux-mint191-review.txt b/linux-mint191-review.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f02660a..0000000 --- a/linux-mint191-review.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,78 +0,0 @@ -While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight. - -While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud", it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users. - -There's a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm", or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. It's just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work. - -It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you're happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look. - -The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint's main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it's not officially supported by Linux Mint. - -## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition - -Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It's been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn't seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right. - -That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon has an optional new "modern" look. - -[image="linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's new look in Linux Mint 19.1"] - -Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you'll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS. - -The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size. - -[image="linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's old look in Linux Mint 19.1 -- that familiar look is just a click away."] - -I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled "First Steps" and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it's emblematic of Linux Mint's approach to change -- give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new "modern" theme better. - -[image="linuxmint191-welcome.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine."] - -As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I'd argue that's a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don't have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I've used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I'm used to, particularly dragging windows around. - -Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There's a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it -- so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag. - -Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint's Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button. - -Mint's Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint's Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. - -Linux Mint's Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you'd have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately -- certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers. - -To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right): - -[image="linuxmint191-contast.png" caption="Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint)."] -. - -## Linux Mint MATE Edition - -It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that's still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there's an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE. - -[image="linuxmint191-mate.jpg" caption="The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] - -The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well). - -One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the "First Steps" section of Mint's welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw. - -While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It's that good. - -The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint's built-in backup tool. It's prominently featured at the top of the "First Steps" section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It's dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you've got your backup location set, just click okay and you're done. - -[image="linuxmint191-backups.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift."] - -If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It's been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don't discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system. - -## Linux Mint Xfce Edition - -I'll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level -- for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes -- are part of the Xfce release as well. - -[image="linuxmint191-xfce.jpg" caption="The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] - -Outside of Mint's tools though there's not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that's still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes. - -## Conclusion - -As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you'll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool. - -Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it's relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there's really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system). - -Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project. - -It's also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it's really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I'm not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well. diff --git a/linuxmint191-review.html b/linuxmint191-review.html deleted file mode 100644 index bb5d9b9..0000000 --- a/linuxmint191-review.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ -

While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.

-

While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn’t anyone’s top pick for “the cloud”, it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I’ll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.

-

There’s a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn’t “changing the desktop computer paradigm”, or “innovating” in “groundbreaking” ways. It’s just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you’ve used, which is to say you’ll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.

-

It’s worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you’re happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven’t tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you’re dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.

-

The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint’s main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn’t work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it’s not officially supported by Linux Mint.

-

Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

-

Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It’s been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn’t seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.

-

That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed “Tessa”, Cinnamon has an optional new “modern” look.

-[image=“linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s new look in Linux Mint 19.1”] -

Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you’ll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.

-

The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.

-[image=“linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s old look in Linux Mint 19.1 – that familiar look is just a click away.”] -

I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled “First Steps” and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it’s emblematic of Linux Mint’s approach to change – give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new “modern” theme better.

-[image=“linuxmint191-welcome.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine.”] -

As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I’d argue that’s a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don’t have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I’ve used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I’m used to, particularly dragging windows around.

-

Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There’s a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it – so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.

-

Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint’s Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.

-

Mint’s Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint’s Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.

-

Linux Mint’s Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you’d have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately – certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.

-

To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):

-[image=“linuxmint191-contast.png” caption=“Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint).”] -

Linux Mint MATE Edition

-

It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that’s still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there’s an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE.

-[image=“linuxmint191-mate.jpg” caption=“The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] -

The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).

-

One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the “First Steps” section of Mint’s welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.

-

While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It’s that good.

-

The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint’s built-in backup tool. It’s prominently featured at the top of the “First Steps” section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It’s dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you’ve got your backup location set, just click okay and you’re done.

-[image=“linuxmint191-backups.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift.”] -

If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It’s been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don’t discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.

-

Linux Mint Xfce Edition

-

I’ll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level – for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes – are part of the Xfce release as well.

-[image=“linuxmint191-xfce.jpg” caption=“The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] -

Outside of Mint’s tools though there’s not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that’s still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.

-

Conclusion

-

As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you’ll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.

-

Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it’s relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there’s really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).

-

Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a Patreon page to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint’s Timeshift project.

-

It’s also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it’s really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I’m not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.

diff --git a/opera-reborn3.txt b/opera-reborn3.txt index e69de29..6bacdf7 100644 --- a/opera-reborn3.txt +++ b/opera-reborn3.txt @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +Opera Software recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser. + +At first glance it's tempting to dismiss the name "Reborn 3" as little more than marketing hype, but given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium. And, for Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move the Chromium 60. + +Opera Reborn 3 -- or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers -- adds a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera's mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version and a new look with light and dark themes available. + +If you haven't checked out Opera lately, it's worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera's Presto rendering engine to Google's Blink rendering engine. + +Opera once [filed a complaint](https://www.wired.com/2007/12/opera-to-the-edotudot-internet-explorer-is-ruining-the-web/) with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the web "by not following accepted Web standards." The since departed founders of Opera would probably never have imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer. + +It's true, this is not the Opera of old -- there's no mail client, no IRC support -- but it does offer a few features that make it more useful than stock Chromium. + +While desktop Opera's user base may, like every other web browser, pale next to that of Google Chrome, it is the source for more than few of the things we all consider must-haves in the web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the "speed dial" of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera. + +Firefox and Chrome have long since copied all those features, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like you check in with what Opera was doing, which is part of what makes this latest release of desktop Opera interesting. + +## Reborn 3 + +The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most the new features arrived in the mobile version first and were brought to the desktop second. This makes sense given that much of Opera's user base is on mobile. + +Mobile is where Opera still leads with considerable innovation, especially Opera Touch which manages to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off -- easy single handed browsing on larger devices. Opera Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog locker that's actually pretty effective at making all those annoying legal-compliance cookie messages go away. + +I've also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is perfect for any bandwidth constrained situations since it uses Opera's servers to first compress pages and then pass them on to your phone in much smaller form, saving considerable bandwidth in the process. + +Opera is clearly trying to bring this same sense of innovation to the desktop with Reborn 3, though the results are, well, less spectacular. + +As visual redesigns of any kind often do, the new themes seems to be a controversial thing in Opera 60, judging my the Opera forums. To my eye the new look is really nice. It's clean, well-thought out in terms of feature placement, and does indeed get out of the way. + +It follows the general trend that's enchanted browser makers for some years now -- reducing the user interface to better display to page -- but doesn't go so far as to remove the very useful sidebar. You can hide that sidebar if you don't use it, but personally I don't worry about the browser using horizontal real estate. Even my tiny 12in 1080p screen is wider than most websites every get. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite for this reason, Vivaldi. + +In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, which has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been studying the more recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner now CEO of Vivaldi. + +While I like Opera's new look, it's not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs then will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen, which I realize many people like (judging by Opera's user forums) but drives me crazy. On the plus side, Opera's tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard. + +The other two standout features in the design revamp for Opera 60 are the decision to move the easy setup menu and snapshot tool into the menu bar. The easy setup menu previous lived on the startup page, but moving it to the toolbar means that most things you'd regularly want to change -- theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more -- are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera's settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi's, are extensive and finding what you want can take a minute. + +The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access too, though for those who don't do massive amounts of web-based research it might be somewhat less useful. + +## Web 3.0 + +Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what's new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time, which is to say most users probably aren't going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies and storing files on IPFS. + +Opera's blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet, which was already part of Opera Mobile, but it's pretty close to the bleeding edge of the internet for most users. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. To turn it on head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet. + +What Opera (and others) call Web 3, refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model. How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. + +For every bit of the traditional website stack there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there's IPFS or Filecoin. And note that, as with anything on the web, one of those options is more a community project than the other. This is true across the board, just because the technology is decentralized does not mean that the implimentation cannot be centralized. So while a decentralized app might use Truebit instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, is it actually any more decentralized? + +Instead of monetizing sites through advertising, many web 3 sites use a localized token-based system, again, whether this actually makes them more decentralized is open to question. + +Then there's the most mainstream part of the decentralized stack -- payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there's Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. + +Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be Ebay replacement [Openbazaar](https://openbazaar.org/) and YouTube alternative [Flixxo](https://flixxo.com/#/). + +What Opera is adding to the mix is an easy way to use the sites with its built-in Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now Opera is only supporting Ethereum, which I don't own so I was unable to test this feature. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road. + +What makes all this interesting, and more than just hype in my mind, is Opera's track record. The question is, now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of web browser? That's a question we won't be able to truly answer for several years. + +## Getting More out of Chromium + +When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge around Blink, which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others, many were worried that a lack of competition would harm the web. There are effectively only two different browsers on the web -- Firefox and everything else. + +That may be bad for the web in some way, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users -- with everything under the hood them same, browser have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features. + +And this is where Opera is miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN. That last bit is an important point because while connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS connection gets you some of the benefits of a VPN, but lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, which means some add-on and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera's "VPN" does not offer the same level of features you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it. + +It's worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera's VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that "When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address." + +Of these above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync. + +Flow is more immediate, doesn't require setting up an account and doesn't run through anyone else's servers. Instead you "pair" your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that's done you can send links, notes, photos and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending. + +The only downside to Flow is that you can only send to Opera Touch, not Opera Mini. + +Once you get beyond headlining features Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I'm a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default its disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle battery saver on and off. + +Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with battery saver on. + +Opera's sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand, but not taking up a tab in the browser. Opera's chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK. + +As someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time -- a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn't work for my use case. + +While I'm browsing Amazon.com from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos also use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they're in dollars and doesn't convert them. This feature does work well going from dollar to Euros though. + +## Conclusion + +Before rendering a verdict on Opera I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I'm currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently. + +Vivaldi is very close to my ideal browser, but seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but it lack many features I rely on to get work done. Qutebrowser's interface is damn near perfect, but it doesn't, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions, which makes fine-grained script blocking impossible. If I could combine Qutebrowser's Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven UI with Vivaldi I'd be getting close to my ideal browser. + +For the last month I've been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a web browser -- Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but none of them are as simple and easy as Opera's Flow. + +In the end though I always end up back at Vivaldi. Two things always draw me back to Vivaldi, the ability to tile multiple pages in a single "tab" view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the "hibernate background tabs" option, which, if you've got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. + +Right now in my browser ranking Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi, I find myself leaving it open if only so I can copy a URL into it and quickly send it to my phone using Flow. And on my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice. diff --git a/published/linux-mint191-review.txt b/published/linux-mint191-review.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f02660a --- /dev/null +++ b/published/linux-mint191-review.txt @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight. + +While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud", it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users. + +There's a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm", or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. It's just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work. + +It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you're happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look. + +The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint's main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it's not officially supported by Linux Mint. + +## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition + +Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It's been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn't seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right. + +That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon has an optional new "modern" look. + +[image="linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's new look in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you'll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS. + +The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size. + +[image="linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg" caption="Cinnamon 4.0's old look in Linux Mint 19.1 -- that familiar look is just a click away."] + +I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled "First Steps" and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it's emblematic of Linux Mint's approach to change -- give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new "modern" theme better. + +[image="linuxmint191-welcome.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine."] + +As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I'd argue that's a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don't have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I've used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I'm used to, particularly dragging windows around. + +Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There's a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it -- so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag. + +Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint's Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button. + +Mint's Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint's Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. + +Linux Mint's Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you'd have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately -- certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers. + +To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right): + +[image="linuxmint191-contast.png" caption="Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint)."] +. + +## Linux Mint MATE Edition + +It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that's still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there's an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE. + +[image="linuxmint191-mate.jpg" caption="The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well). + +One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the "First Steps" section of Mint's welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw. + +While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It's that good. + +The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint's built-in backup tool. It's prominently featured at the top of the "First Steps" section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It's dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you've got your backup location set, just click okay and you're done. + +[image="linuxmint191-backups.jpg" caption="Linux Mint's helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift."] + +If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It's been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don't discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system. + +## Linux Mint Xfce Edition + +I'll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level -- for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes -- are part of the Xfce release as well. + +[image="linuxmint191-xfce.jpg" caption="The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1"] + +Outside of Mint's tools though there's not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that's still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes. + +## Conclusion + +As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you'll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool. + +Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it's relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there's really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system). + +Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project. + +It's also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it's really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I'm not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well. diff --git a/published/linuxmint191-review.html b/published/linuxmint191-review.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb5d9b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/linuxmint191-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +

While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Between IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop, Linux Mint saw very few headlines. Linux Mint churned out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base, but for the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight.

+

While Linux Mint might not have been grabbing headlines, and it probably isn’t anyone’s top pick for “the cloud”, it nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube odds are I’ll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth: for a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.

+

There’s a good reason for that popularity. Linux Mint just works. It isn’t “changing the desktop computer paradigm”, or “innovating” in “groundbreaking” ways. It’s just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you’ve used, which is to say you’ll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.

+

It’s worth asking then, why switch from what I have now? Well if you’re happy with what you have now, then stick with whatever it is, but if it happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven’t tried to upgrade yet. If what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04, and you’re dreading the upgrade to GNOME, well, Mint is worth a look.

+

The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors, two homegrown projects, Cinnamon, really Linux Mint’s main desktop, and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light, and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right, and an XFCE version. Previously there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn’t work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it’s not officially supported by Linux Mint.

+

Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

+

Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint. It’s been a mature, stable project for some time and it hasn’t seen much in the way of change in years. It uses a very familiar paradigm, a bottom panel that holds a button menu on the left, and good old Windows XP-style windows list in the middle and a system tray on the right.

+

That traditional look and feel has finally been tweaked a little for Cinnamon 4.0. For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed “Tessa”, Cinnamon has an optional new “modern” look.

+[image=“linuxmint191-newtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s new look in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

Fear not change haters, the old look is just a click away, and the redesign is pretty mild anyway. Still, by default, Mint 19.1 Cinnamon will look slightly different to long-time Mint users. Cinnamon 4.0 has a slightly larger task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over an icon in the task bar and you’ll see window previews for any open windows. It looks and behaves like the same feature in Windows and macOS.

+

The new look is a result of Mint devs discovering that a lot of users were replacing the standard window list applet with a third-party window list applet to get the window grouping and previews features. Mint decided it should have that feature out of the box so it forked the code and integrated it into Cinnamon directly, along with some other customization options like icon size.

+[image=“linuxmint191-oldtheme.jpg” caption=“Cinnamon 4.0’s old look in Linux Mint 19.1 – that familiar look is just a click away.”] +

I happen to prefer the old look and paradigm where each window gets its own button. To revert to the older style, you can either head into the Mint settings panel, or you can do it right from the start using the option in the Mint welcome screen. Click the sidebar item labeled “First Steps” and look for the Desktop option. Putting the option to select your favorite layout in the welcome screen is a nice touch and it’s emblematic of Linux Mint’s approach to change – give users a choice rather than just shoving the latest and greatest down their throats. And in the end, after a couple of weeks of using it I decided I liked the new “modern” theme better.

+[image=“linuxmint191-welcome.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s very nice Welcome app walks you through setting up your machine.”] +

As has been the case for some time, Cinnamon itself does not see any major new features in this release. In a day and age when system updates seem to wreck havoc, I’d argue that’s a feature not a bug. And there are improvements aplenty, the most notable being that the Nemo file manager is, according to Mint, three times faster than the previous release thanks to some code optimizations. I don’t have an objective way to test it, but Nemo, which I’ve used extensively under Arch, does seem quite a bit faster than I’m used to, particularly dragging windows around.

+

Cinnamon in general feels snappier, something Mint says will be even more obvious if you have an NVIDIA card. There’s a new option in the Cinnamon settings to turn off VSYNC. Disabling VSYNC will get you higher FPS, thus making things feel snappier, but it pushes VSYNC tasks off to your GPU driver, which needs to handle it – so if you see a lot of screen tearing, especially when watching videos, turn VSYNC back on. If it works without tearing you should see a performance boost and perhaps eliminate some input lag.

+

Exposing low-level options like this is, I believe, why the distro tends to be a popular destination for users who are, if not fed up with, then feeling a little let down by Ubuntu. A very similarly exposed low level feature is an ability to browse and see the support status of all available mainline kernels in Mint’s Update Manager. You can also now easily remove unused kernels with the click of a button.

+

Mint’s Software Sources tool looks slightly different in this release, more in line with the rest of Mint’s Xapps since it now uses uses the Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.

+

Linux Mint’s Mint-Y theme, the default theme in both Cinnamon and MATE continues to be refined in subtle ways. Through a series of very slight changes Mint Y ends up with significantly improved contrast. To me this was most noticeable in background windows, or rather the opposite: the foreground window is much more noticeable as such thanks to the darker, more contrasty text. Once the kind of attention to detail you’d have to turn to macOS to find, this is the sort of polish that has become part of many Linux desktops lately – certainly elementaryOS sweats these things, and Ubuntu got that ball rolling so speak. As someone who spends most of my time in either a terminal window or a web browser, these improvements are a little lost on me, but for those who crave them Linux Mint 19.1 delivers.

+

To see the difference between old and new themes check out the screenshot below, which shows a Nemo file browser window with the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with changes in 19.1 (on the right):

+[image=“linuxmint191-contast.png” caption=“Labels look sharper and stand out on top of their backgrounds, making it easier to tell foreground windows from background (image from LinuxMint).”] +

Linux Mint MATE Edition

+

It used to be that MATE served as the less resource intensive alternative to Cinnamon in the Linux Mint world. While that’s still true, MATE has emerged to become a very full-featured, powerful desktop in its own right, so much so that there’s an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. In fact I think Ubuntu MATE is at least as good, perhaps better than, Linux Mint MATE.

+[image=“linuxmint191-mate.jpg” caption=“The stock MATE desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

The difference really comes down to whether you want all the Mint-based extras like the Update Manager and Software Sources tools mentioned above (which are part of MATE as well).

+

One nice new feature in this release that applies to both the Cinnamon and MATE releases, is a new Firewall configuration option in the “First Steps” section of Mint’s welcome screen. Security concious users can quickly and easily set up a firewall using Gufw.

+

While Gufw is not a Mint app, an increasing number of the apps you get with Mint are homegrown (at least to some degree, some are forked from upstream projects). This release sees some improvements to Xreader, to my mind one of the nicest PDF readers around, I regularly use it outside of Linux Mint even though it has quite a few Linux Mint dependencies. It’s that good.

+

The other standout Xapp to my mind is Timeshift, which is Linux Mint’s built-in backup tool. It’s prominently featured at the top of the “First Steps” section when you first boot Linux Mint, but if you missed it then you can always find it in the apps menu. It’s dead simple to set up, just open it and check the option to use Rsync. That will enable incremental snapshot updates where new files live in the latest snapshot, but older files are hard-linked to previous snapshot, saving considerable disk space. Select next and the little wizard will scan your disks, figure out how much space you need to make a backup and ask where you want to put that backup. This would be the time to insert your external drive. Once you’ve got your backup location set, just click okay and you’re done.

+[image=“linuxmint191-backups.jpg” caption=“Linux Mint’s helpful Rsync wrapper, known as Timeshift.”] +

If you want to you can go into the settings tab and change how frequently snapshots are made and how many are kept on hand. By default Mint will make daily backups and keep five of them. I suggest adding a weekly backup, keeping three of those and a monthly backup and keeping 2 of those. This strategy, which I implemented years ago using a bash script, has more than once saved my bacon (for completeness sake I should also add that I keep multiple off-site copies of the weekly and monthly backups as well). It’s been my experience that most people lack a good backup strategy and don’t discover how important it is to have one until they learn it the very painful way. I like that Mint has put the idea front and center from the moment you install the system.

+

Linux Mint Xfce Edition

+

I’ll confess I had never, until this release, paid much attention to the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. Part of the reason was that it always felt like an afterthought. The main development energy clearly goes into Cinnamon and MATE, but all the tools mentioned above that are system level – for example the Update Manager, Software Sources and the Mint-Y theme changes – are part of the Xfce release as well.

+[image=“linuxmint191-xfce.jpg” caption=“The stock Xfce desktop in Linux Mint 19.1”] +

Outside of Mint’s tools though there’s not much new in Linux Mint Xfce 19.1. It ships with Xfce 4.12, which is nearly four years old now, but in Xfce terms that’s still pretty new. Like MATE, and to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, Xfce is essentially done. Every release tends to bring some incremental improvements, but this is not the place to look for massive changes. This is the place for those looking to avoid massive changes.

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Conclusion

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As mentioned above, for the duration of the Mint Linux 19 line the project will use the Ubuntu 18.04 package base. With 19.1 you’ll get Linux kernel 4.15.0-20. You can of course easily browse and install any supported kernel available in the Mint repos via the aforementioned Update Manager tool.

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Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release (LTS) with critical updates and fixes coming until 2023. Because 19.1 is, like 19.0, based on an Ubuntu 18.04 base it’s relatively easy to upgrade from Linux Mint 19 to 19.1. That said, there are a couple no-longer-needed packages you might want to get rid of and a couple new ones that might not be installed in the upgrade. See the Linux Mint blog for full upgrade details and be sure to make a backup of your system before you do (with the great Timeshift tool there’s really no excuse not to always have a good backup of your system).

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Linux Mint is funded primarily through donations and the project recently added a Patreon page to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer not to use Paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that Patreon money is going toward Mint’s Timeshift project.

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It’s also worth mentioning that Linux Mint Debian Edition still exists as well, though it runs on an entirely different update cycle and is not part of the Ubuntu-based system reviewed here. In fact it’s really an entirely different distro and I find it somewhat remarkable that Linux Mint is able to maintain and support two distros, I’m not aware of another project that does that. With Debian hard at work on version 10, which will reportedly be released later this year, expect Linux Mint Debian Edition to have a major update on the horizon as well.

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