The Linux Mint project has released Mint 18, a major upgrade not only for Mint's dueling desktops -- Cinnamon and MATE -- but for all the underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 16.04.

The move to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu means that, as with the Mint 17.x release series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for the next two years. 
Rather than tracking Ubuntu, Mint 18.1 and all subsequent release will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. That doesn't necessarily mean Mint will get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two year cycle, but it does mean that nothing major is going to change at the low level for quite a while.

If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that's a good thing and allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years, including moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8, which will also mean updating many components that will affect downstream users like Mint.

If you're looking for an Ubuntu-like system, but don't want to be Canonical's lab rat for the transition to Mir and Unity 8, Mint 18.x make a familiar, but stable Linux environment.

In some ways Mint has become what Ubuntu once was -- a stable, new-user-friendly gateway to Linux. Installation is simpler than upgrading to Windows 10 -- though there is one additional headache with this release, more on that below -- and once it's installed both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops will be familiar to anyone switching from Windows. 

While Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME's 3.x series opt for sometimes radical changes, Cinnamon and MATE have taken a slower, more progressive path. Mint has elected to evolve rather than "revolutionize", making it a far more comfortable choice for newcomers who aren't likely to enjoy have the rug pulled out from under them every time they upgrade. 

Mint's slower, more evolutionary path seems to be serving it well, enabling it to play tortoise to Ubuntu's revolutionary hare. These days Mint is possibly the most popular desktop Linux distro around, at least according to Distrowatch (which should be taken more as a rough guess rather than rock solid stats).

# What's New in Mint 18

Mint 18.x is well poised to continue to drive Mint's popularity. It's a solid release with some big changes (most of which won't cause the average user any problems), but both Cinnamon and MATE look and behave more or less as they always have, with a number of incremental improvements.

Mint 18 has a lot of updates under the hood, most of which the average desktop user can safely ignore, though there is one change that will mean an extra installation step for many users. Mint 18 is the first Mint release to ship without patent-encumbered codecs and plugins. The change is a result of legal and copyright issues in some countries, particularly the United States.

To help out with the install there's a new GUI app dedicated to installing multimedia codecs. It's prominently listed in the start menu on both Cinnamon and MATE, making it fairly obvious for new users, though nowhere near as simple as having it just work from the start. There is a new command line tool that will allow you to package up the codecs from the install disk (without having to have an internet connection). It's nice to see Mint is aware that not everyone who uses it necessarily has constant high speed internet connections. Too many Linux distros seem blissfully unaware that many of their users don't have always-on, high speed access (or worse, they just don't care). It's an especially nice touch since not shipping with codecs in the first place is really to appease the legal restrictions of U.S. users, while potentially dumping the bandwidth problem on those who could have had the codecs bundled legally.

Interestingly, if you happen to use the Chrome web browser (not installed by default) and VLC for videos (also not installed by default) you might not even need most of the codecs since both apps bundle the necessary codecs and plugins themselves. That really just leaves the MP3 codecs to install.

Straight out of the box Linux Mint 18.1's flagship Cinnamon desktop looks just like its predecssor. The theme is still the "Mint X" theme that's been the default for Cinnamon for years now. There is, however, change on its way. You can preview what will likely soon byt he new default Cinnamon theme in Mint 17 by heading to Settings >> Appearance and switching to the new theme, Mint Y. 

As you would expect from Mint,it's not radically different. It's a bit flatter, buttons are less 3D, gradients have been toned down and window bars blend into toolbars a bit like the did in versions of GNOME 3 back when toolbars and windows bars were still separate things.

When the new look was first previewed back in January of this year ther was a bit of an outcry from Mint users, which Mint's lead developer Clément Lefebvre addressed in a blog post that could well serve as a kind of Mint mission statement:

> We’ve all witnessed the rise of the iPad and the iPhone. This was attributed to iOS somehow and it started a new trend with various projects trying to replicate Apple’s success, inventing new formulas and radically changing their own goals, focus or identity in the process. We've seen a new artistic trend called "flat", with bright colors, no gradients and minimalistic widgets, taking these projects by storm. You don’t see us at the forefront of all that. We do keep a close eye on it, without any intention to jump into it, but rather to learn from it and to see if it can help us improve what we’re already doing.

> People who enjoyed Linux Mint years ago still enjoy it nowadays. If you enjoy it now, chances are you’ll enjoy it still for a long time. You’re here because you enjoy it right now, we know that, we enjoy it too, and we’ve no intention of being anything else. So, in the context of that “new look and feel”, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. We’re talking about icons and GTK themes here. We’re also committed to supporting Mint-X, so with a click of a mouse you’ll be able to make Mint 18 look just like the way Mint 17 did. 

Mint Y is, in other words, a nice evolution of Mint X with a nod to the current trend of "flat" user interface design. And yes, It looks similar to GNOME, KDE, OS X 10.11 and Windows 10 are doing. Mint X looks similar to what GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows were doing six years ago -- it had a decidedly "metallic" look to it which a certain fruit themed OS also used around that time. Mint Y simply evolves to fit with the modern OS world. That's part of what "evolutionary" means -- changing to better fit the current environment.

Somewhere between then and now Lefebvre and team must have changed their minds about making Mint Y the default though. As of Mint 18.1 if you want to evolve the look and feel of Mint you'll have to do it yourself. If you'd like a slightly different feel there's also a very nice dark theme, Mint Y dark.

The move to a flatter theme may be motivated by a good bit more than keeping pace with contemporaries in the style department, it may well be related to another change in Mint 18 -- something called X Apps.

Mint 18 updates its base system to Ubuntu 16.04, which means under the hood Mint 18 has moved from GNOME/GTK 3.10 to 3.18. Since GNOME does not adhere to Mint's evolutionary philsophy, but like to make radical changes from point release to point release, there are some huge changes involved in moving from 3.10 to 3.18. 

Sometimes this is a good thing. Mint 18 benefits from much improved HiDPI support, which is now just as good and GNOME's. It also means that Mint has been able to add popular apps like Spotify, Dropbox and Steam to its repos, making them much eaiser to install.

The move to GNOME 3.18 is not, however, without its downsides for Mint. As Lefebvre writes in the same blog post mentioned above, "GNOME applications now integrate better with GNOME Shell and look more native in that environment. The bad news, is that they now look completely out of place everywhere else." For Mint the issue is further complicated by being downstream from Ubuntu, which heavily patches GTK, GNOME applications and the GNOME environment itself. 

In the past Mint has dealt with this problem the same way Ubuntu has -- by downgrading apps and patching where necessary, occassionally patching on top of Ubuntu's patches. The changes in GNOME 3.16 and onward however make this extremely time consuming and impractical. 

Instead Mint has decided to create X Apps. No, the distro isn't building out clones of GNOME apps. Lefebvre rejects this idea writing, "it was decided early that Cinnamon would not get its own applications, because it represented too much work and there were too few differences in application needs between Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce."

Instead Mint has kick of the X Apps project. Essentially what it does is take GTK apps and re-theme them in way that they'll look at home on all of Mint's desktop releases, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. For Mint 18 there are five X apps, xedit (a text editor), Xviewer (an image viewer), Xreader (a PDF/document viewer), Pix (a simple photo organizer) and Xplayer (a video player). 

In the end X Apps become a seamless part of the Mint 18 experience. Users don't really need to know the Xplayer is a heavily theme and patched version of Totem or that Xviewer is Eye of GNOME. What's even nicer is that the X Apps get all the underlying features that make modern GNOME apps nice, namely HiDPI support and support for customization via gsettings.

Another change to be aware of in Mint 18 is that Mint's homegrown "apt" command now supports the Debian's command of the same name. Mint's apt was originally a shortcut for a handful of package related commands, including apt-get, aptitude, and apt-cache. Since Mint's debuted Debian has created an similar shortcut with the same name. Since tutorials typically refer to the Debian version Mint has updated its tool to mirror Debian's version. Mint's apt, however, still supports all its own commands, many of which Debian's does not.

## What's new in Cinnamon

Mint 18.1 ships with Cinnamon 3.0. In keeping with the evolutionary nature of Mint-related projects, Cinnamon 3.0 is not a radical departure from the past, but a careful refinement of existing features and some new customization options.

Cinnamon is not a tiling window manager by any means, but it does have an interesting window-snapping form of tiling that has been improved in this release. It's a long way from Xmonad or Awesome, but if you're a casual tiler it will allow you to tile your windows when you need to.

A more useful change in this release is the ability to eliminate potentially unused cruft from the start menu. Right-clicking the Mint button will bring up the customization screen with new options to hide favorites, bookmarks, system settings and other infrequently used items. The result is a cleaner start menu if you want such a thing. It's not a feature that everyone will use. In fact, I didn't use it, but I like that it's there because I like Mint is still developing features useful to a small segment of users and hasn't caved to the tyranny of the majority like certain other desktops.







The update Manager has also undergone changes. Now after the first login, the user is also asked to update the system, but before you begin the upgrade welcome window Manager with a choice of updates of three options: