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Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed a lot of headlines last year. Between IBM bought Red Hat. Canonical launching its biggest Long Term Support update in a long while, moving back to GNOME, but Linux Mint, once a darling of the tech press, had fairly quiet year. 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 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 innovating, 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 immediate 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 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 release 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 in was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but its not officially supported by Mint.
## Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition
Cinnamon is the desktop that really shines for Linux Mint.
For Linux Mint 19.1, nicknamed "Tessa", Cinnamon gets a new look. 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. The changes are part of the upgrade to Cinnamon 4.0, which has a slightly task bar and icon set, but the big difference in terms of usability is that windows are grouped by application. Hover over
Linux Mint 19.1 is also a long term support release (LTS). It will get critical updates and fixes from release until 2023.
Linux Mint 19.1 Beta Features
Linux Mint 19.1 features a raft of notable improvements, but few major new features (save for its new desktop layout, which we’ll get to in a second).
The Nemo file manager is 3x faster than before thanks, Mint say, to code optimisations, and picks up the ability to toggle thumbnails on or off on a per-directory basis.
## Conclusion
The project also added a [Patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint) to the list of ways you can support it. If you prefer no to use paypal to donate money you can now do so through Patreon. Much of that money is going toward Mint's Timeshift project.
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