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Clement Lefebvre and the team behind Linux Mint have release version 17.1.
This is first Linux Mint release that sticks with the same Ubuntu base system that Mint used the last time around in Mint 17, released in May of this year.
While Mint's underpinnings remain unchanged -- Mint 17 is still built off Ubuntu 14.04 -- both of Mint's popular desktops have seen major updates that make Mint 17.1 a welcome upgrade for Mint fans.
Linux Mint 17.1 is the first example of what the Linux Mint team can do when they're focused on their own system and components rather than busy making the latest Ubuntu release work with Mint.
Mint's flagship Cinnamon desktop, which is fast becoming the best desktop in Linux, has been updated to Cinnamon 2.4 in this release. Cinnamon 2.4 does not have any revolutionary new features, but it does polish, refine and, perhaps most noticeably, speed up the Cinnamon experience.
The polish and attention to details can be seen from the very first time you launch Cinnamon 2.4, which will greet you with a new zooming animation and startup found reminiscent of GNOME 3. It's a small thing, but it helps establish a more refined feel for Cinnamon right from the start.
Much of the work in Cinnamon 2.4 went into speeding things up and reducing the memory usage. According to the Mint team, all the underlying source code was evaluated and some 30 small memory leaks were found and fixed. The result is a speedier, less resource intensive desktop that works even better on older and less powerful hardware.
Speaking of hardware there are a couple small changes that are good news for anyone trying to run Mint on a Mac laptop -- Mint 17.1 features support for single button trackpads. Even better there's a nice new section in the Settings >> Mouse and Touchpad panel which makes it easy to configure which actions apply to 2-finger and 3-finger clicks (by default it's right and middle click respectively).
Nemo, Cinnamon's default file browser application also gets some love in this release. Of particular interest is the new option to change folder colors and add what Mint calls "emblems" to folders. Emblems are best thought of as little sub-icons that sit atop the folder icon, for example the little filmstrip icon that sits atop the Videos folder by default.
The emblems and color options are also visible in the Nemo sidebar and make it a little easier to find the folder you want at a glance. Regrettably the colors and emblems are not visible in application open/save dialogs, where they would also be helpful.
The Cinnamon Settings app has been refined a bit in this release, with a few new options including a new Notification Settings pane, Privacy Settings pane (to control how long "Recent Files" dialogs store their data) and more. The revamped Background Settings pane now supports background slide shows, and the Theme settings have been completely redone. The overall settings view also now lists panes in alphabetical order within each category.
Cinnamon 2.4 is also chock full of small, but welcome new features and updates, like a configurable desktop font, custom fonts and dates in the screen saver, multiple panel launchers, sound applet improvements, a new default keyboard shortcut Super+e which opens up the home directory (a la Windows) and of course a lot of bug fixes.
It's worth noting that changes in Cinnamon 2.4's core components mean that any keyboard shortcuts and customizations you have made will not migrate. There's a script included with the update that can make the migration for you, but you'll need to run it by hand. See Linux Mint's Segfault blog for <a href="http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2014/11/cinnamon-2-4/">more details</a> on how to do that.
The other face of Mint 17.1 is the MATE desktop, which is now at MATE 1.8.
MATE has always taken a backseat to Cinnamon when it comes to desktop eye candy, often being touted as a good choice for older hardware or those who crave the GNOME 2.x experience. That changes with this release though. MATE 1.8 now includes the Compiz Window Manager right out of the box. It's not the default, that remains MATE's own Marco windows manager, which is still simple, lightweight and under-powered-hardware-friendly, but a single click will switch to Compiz.
With Compiz readily available it's now pretty easy to trick out MATE and get something much closer to the visual splash of Cinnamon. If you've been missing the once-ubiquitous rotating cube animation from the Compiz/GNOME 2.x days, MATE in Mint 17.1 is the easiest way I've seen to bring it back. Should you tire of rotating cubes, you can use MATE's "Desktop Settings" pane, to switch back and forth between the two window managers.
Mint continues to refine its already excellent Update Manager. The Update Manager in Mint 17.1 MATE now groups packages together according to their source package. That means that a line in the Update Manager now represents a software update, which itself might consist of several individual package updates. For example, if LibreOffice had 20 package updates, they would all be grouped as a single entry you can choose to update or not. The idea here is to prevent you from applying incomplete updates, which is nice, though not a problem I've ever actually encountered in my time using Mint or Ubuntu.
What I like even more in MATE's Update Manager is the kernel selection screen, which has been redesigned to quickly let you review known security fixes and known regressions in kernel updates.
Speaking of the kernel, Linux Mint 17.1 features the Linux kernel v3.13. That's a bit behind most distros, but again, Mint is sticking with an Ubuntu 14.04 base so some things will not be at the latest and greatest.
The default Mint theme, common to both desktops and known as Mint-X has been updated for this release as well. The most noticeable change is the new font. Mint now uses Google's Noto font family thoughout by default. Noto looks pretty similar to the old font, but has much better language support (the main goal behind Noto is in fact to "support all the world’s languages", which makes it a good choice for anything with a wide variety of translations).
This release also sees package updates for most of Mint's default software -- something many were worried would not happen given the Ubuntu 14.04 base. But Mint 17.1 ships with the latest stable versions of Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC and other common desktop software.
Because Mint 17.1 is still based on the same LTS release of Ubuntu as Mint 17, 17.1 is also a long term support release with security updates coming until 2019.
Sticking with the Ubuntu base means it should be trivial to upgrade from Mint 17. The Mint blog promises that an update process will be available shortly after the final release (as of the RC release I tested there was not an easy way to upgrade).
Having tested the latest releases of most major Linux distros in the past two months -- Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Elementary and Mint -- Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon 2.4 is hands down the best of the bunch. With a desktop that's fast, elegant and user friendly, a stable base and the extensive package system Ubuntu is famous for, Mint is the best of several worlds.
Being a bigger fan of Debian and Ubuntu, I'm looking forward to Linux Mint Debian Edition, which will soon be pushing out a release based on Debian Jessie. Until then, I'll be using Linux Mint 17.1.
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