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<p>I knew when I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016 I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="linux-mint-cinnamon-edition">Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition</h2>
[image="mint181-cinn-desktop.jpg" caption="The stock Mint 18.1 desktop with Cinnamon 3.2"]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_serena_cinnamon_whatsnew.php">calls</a> "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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
[image="mint181-vert-panel.jpg" caption="With Cinnamon 3.2 you can now have vertical panels."]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
[image="mint181-search.jpg" caption="Search by one name, find by another."]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
[image="mint181-update.jpg" caption="Mint's updated Update Manager now shows (and can sort by) the source of your updates."]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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".</p>
[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."]
<p>I didn't call this out in the last review, but it deserves it because frankly, this is a load of crap.</p>
<p>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 <em>can</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
[image="mint181-kernel-update.jpg" caption="What happens when you press this red button?"]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="mate">MATE</h2>
<p>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.</p>
[image="mint181-mate-desktop.jpg" caption="The default Mint MATE desktop with MATE 1.16"]
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>Does Mint 18.1 deserve to wrestle the best distro of the year title from Fedora? For me, in a word, no.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
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