Many thanks for your support and your donations. You make this project thrive and it’s a real pleasure to work on it.
We’ve had to overcome a few issues and this development cycle hasn’t been the smoothest, but we’re really happy right now. We’re excited to get close to the BETA release and to show everybody what we’ve been working on. We’re proud of our achievements and some of the features and improvements which were implemented. We’re delighted to be together and to have fun within the team, working on all of this.
Nemo: Pinning items
The Cinnamon file manager features some cool new features. If you find yourself always looking for the same files over and over again… just pin them.
It’s that easy. Pinned items show up on top and are easy to reach.
Nemo: Conditional actions
When you right-click a file, you see the actions you can perform on it. Until now these actions could only be generic. Starting with Nemo 4.2, actions can implement their own external condition. In other words, actions can use scripts or external commands to target specific files in specific conditions. This will allow us to ship actions which are much smarter than before.
Let’s take an example. When you right-click a picture, you can choose the “Set as Wallpaper” action. This action targets all pictures files. No matter what file you select, if it’s a picture file, you’ll see this action.
Going forward we can have actions for specific use cases, which won’t get in the way of your daily use, but which will be there for you when you need them.
Say you right-click an .mkv which is larger than 4GB, just choose to “Split it”. Say you select a video which audio is encoded as DTS.. just right-click it and choose “Convert DTS audio to AC3”. Say the picture you’re right-clicking has geolocation in its metadata, just right-click “Show me where it was taken” to open up the map.
The sky is the limit, these are just examples. In future releases we’ll need to assess the performance costs of shipping a multitude of actions. With Nemo 4.2, we now have the technology to do it (and so do you if you want to make your own actions). Actions can predict whether they’re needed or not way better than they could ever do in the past, and that will allow us to make your right-click menu in your file manager one of the handiest tools there is.
Cinnamon menu
Cinnamon is faster and snappier than before. It uses less RAM and it loads faster. Some of these improvements come from the DocInfo and Appsys reviews, some come from the Muffin window manager, and some come from the work done on the application menu.
Beside the performance improvements the application menu now identifies and distinguishes duplicates. If two applications have the same name, the menu will show more information about them.
In your application menu, Xed is the “Text Editor”. If you install Gedit, you no longer end up with two “Text Editor” entries. Instead, you’ll see “Text Editor (Xed)” and “Text Editor (Gedit)”.
The same goes for Flatpaks, if you install the Flatpak of an application you already have, the menu will distinguish between the two to let you know which one is the one from the repositories and which one is the Flatpak.
Scrollbar settings
This is not for everybody but it’s been requested many times in the past. People who don’t like overlay scrollbars or who want to override the theme settings will be able to so graphically.
Xapps
Pix, along with the text editor, the document reader, the video player and the image viewer were reviewed and support was added to ensure users could use the traditional Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W keyboard shortcuts.
In the document reader preferences, a zoom selector can now be added to the toolbar.
MintBox 3
We’re working with Compulab on the most powerful MintBox ever.
MintBox 3 will be based on the Airtop 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35OyZzCvG0g
I’ve been using an Airtop1 as my main computer for a while now and it’s a beautiful machine.
The specifications and prices below aren’t final:
1. Basic configuration: $1543 with a Core i5 (6 cores), 16 GB RAM, 256 GB EVO 970, Wi-Fi and FM-AT3 FACE Module.
2. High end: $2698 with Core i9, GTX 1660 Ti, 32 GB RAM, 1TB EVO 970, WiFi and FM-AT3 FACE Module.
Snap
When snap was announced it was supposed to be a solution, not a problem. It was supposed to make it possible to run newer apps on top of older libraries and to let 3rd party editors publish their software easily towards multiple distributions, just like Flatpak and AppImage. What we didn’t want it to be was for Canonical to control the distribution of software between distributions and 3rd party editors, to prevent direct distribution from editors, to make it so software worked better in Ubuntu than anywhere else and to make its store a requirement.
If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best.
We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ? I think it’s important to appreciate these aspects.
We all have smartphones, and we all know how great the Google Play store is. How often do we see .apk (Android packages) on the web ? How hard are they to install without the Google store ? How free is an editor to publish its .apk itself while being present in the store ? Who controls all that and what does it mean for us ? Who governs what can and cannot go into the store ? Who makes commercial deals ? Who do we rely on ? And why ?
As long as snap is a solution to a problem, it’s great. Just like Flatpak, it can solve some of the real issues we have with frozen package bases. It can provide us with software we couldn’t otherwise run as packages. When it starts replacing packages for no good reason though, when it starts harming our interaction with upstream projects and software vendors and reducing our choice, it becomes a threat.
A Fedora user shouldn’t be told about Ubuntu and Ubuntu One when downloading software. His browser shouldn’t have bookmarks pointing to another distribution. His software shouldn’t be designed and tested primarily with another desktop environment and distribution in mind, and when he looks at screenshots he shouldn’t see Ubuntu everywhere. It’s wrong for Spotify to do that and it’s wrong for any vendor to think that such a store can be the only store for all Linux users. For this to work it would need to be governed by us all, with clear goals, without bias and without conflict of interest.
When Flatpak came out it immediately allowed anyone to create stores. The Flatpak client can talk to multiple stores. Spotify is on Flathub and they can push towards it. If tomorrow they have an argument with Flathub they can create their own store and the very same Flatpak client will still work with it. When Snap came out, it was only a client. The server was behind closed doors and the client couldn’t talk to multiple servers. We’ve been worried about this since then, but it was OK. As long as Snap didn’t become the de-facto standard for all editors to publish to all users of Linux, it was OK. As long as editors didn’t stop distributing packages, it was OK. As long as Snap didn’t remove what we already had, it was perfectly OK. The Ubuntu Store, which is now called the Snap Store (which makes sense since there can only be “one” store, by design), was promising because it could provide software we didn’t have access to, and a payment platform to purchase commercial software. It’s doing much more than that though, it could reduce access to free (as in beer) software and free (as in freedom) software.
There are a lot of things you can do with package managers (apt/dpkg in Linux Mint), that you can’t do with Snap, and there are two reasons for this. First, they’ve been around for a while. They’re mature, they’re integrated fully within the OS in every distributions. Second, they’ve been developed with Free Software in mind. There are no commercial aspects in the design of apt/dpkg, it’s all about empowering users and distributions. You can’t modify, rebuild, pin, patch, mirror a snap, you’re not supposed to.
I’ve been invited to participate by the Snap developers and I’m hoping one day we’ll be able to integrate snap into Linux Mint. Although I’m worried about the impact on the market, I think snap could work both as a client and a file format, if it didn’t lock us into a single store. You might wonder why I’m so outspoken about this all of a sudden. There’s a certain sense of urgency which demands action on our side. Ubuntu is planning to replace the Chromium repository package with an empty package which installs the Chromium snap. In other words, as you install APT updates, Snap becomes a requirement for you to continue to use Chromium and installs itself behind your back. This breaks one of the major worries many people had when Snap was announced and a promise from its developers that it would never replace APT.
The plan isn’t just to delegate part of APT with Snap in the current Ubuntu releases, but also to backport this change towards Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. We don’t want this to affect Linux Mint.
I don’t think the points we’re raising here are well understood by the community. I hope we’ll talk with Ubuntu and the Snap project about this. We’re very interested in your feedback as well. A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO NO. It’s something we have to stop and it could mean the end of Chromium updates and access to the snap store in Linux Mint.
32-bit support going forward
The announcement from Canonical that 32-bit support was to be dropped in Ubuntu 20.04 means that the future Linux Mint 20 will only be able to be released in 64-bit. Linux Mint 19.x is already available in 32-bit and it can be used until 2023. I think most people are happy with this and dropping 32-bit releases going forward makes sense in 2020.
Many questions were raised about multiarch support though. Steam, Wine and other popular applications used in Linux Mint 64-bit cannot work properly without 32-bit libraries.
Canonical addressed these questions and announced this wouldn’t be an issue. This is very important to us also. There’s no reason to think Ubuntu 20.04 will lack the proper support. If it did, or if the chosen solutions made Snap a requirement, we’re committed to solving them as well.
Talking with the Media
A new Slack team was started for journalists, bloggers, youtubers and podcasters to get in touch with us directly and more easily.
The idea behind this team is for the media to be able to quickly ask us questions, for us to give scoops and for this blog to not be the only source of information about Linux Mint.
We also encourage authors to let us know about their videos, articles and podcasts. That allows us to talk with them privately, to react to their content, to answer questions it might raise and to explain design decisions. Sometimes the content leads to improvements within Linux Mint and it’s also nice to be able to follow up.
If you’re a journalist, a blogger, a youtuber or a podcaster and you’re interested in getting in touch with us, let us know by email. If your media is serious, doesn’t show bias or promote controversies, we’ll be delighted to work with you and share more information about us and the projects we work on.
Sponsorships:
Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:
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In my opinion, Ubuntu (and therefore, Mint) is doing the right thing by dropping 32-bit support. i386 is an ageing architecture, akin to what 16-bit was at its final time. 2020 is at our doorstep, and the computer world needs to move on, just like it did with 16-bit years ago. For those with concerns, I’m sure Canonical will provide a solution for software such as Wine, Steam and so on, and if not, the excellent team here at Mint will provide its own.
And, I must say, I find Mint to be one of the few distros to allow users to make many, many changes to settings via a GUI. This is very important. If Mint wants to replace other OSes (wink, wink, Windows), that’s the way to go. Not every computer user is terminal-savy, and for newcomers (or people like me who just don’t want to use the terminal for EVERYTHING because is 2020) the GUI option is a real deal-breaker. Moreover, it adds a Windows-user-friendly environment that is much appreciated for anyone coming from that OS.
You guys are doing a PERFECT work. Long live Linux Mint!
Sorry, I meant to write “I find Mint to be one of the few distros that allows users”
> And, I must say, I find Mint to be one of the few distros to allow users to make many, many changes to settings via a GUI. This is very important.
I would like to say that I concur with that view.
Yeah, I’d like to see this customization in terms of being possible to change at least color of our windows, their background, borders thickness and color, title bar, and so forth.
This would mean a proper customization that old Gnome 2.x, KDE, and even old/new Windows have by default.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I don’t understand the obsession people have with 32-bit arch. The same crap happened when 8-bit moved to 16-bit and so forth. Why can’t people just leave well enough alone? 64-bit is the natural progression and the logical step forward. There’s no benefit to keeping 32-bit alive and well when it’s prowess and mainline use was only really reliable in its time. The majority of today’s machines simply aren’t looking at that lens anymore and a lot of that simply has to do with the market as well as the natural progression of things (i.e. technology). Hello, Moore’s law. Anyone? Being in IT or anything even related to it such as this, you of all people should be accepting and maintain the reality that things are constantly changing in this part of the field. That’s just how it is. I don’t understand what people were thinking when visible signs of 32-bit support being dropped were clearly being shown for a long time—and even if they weren’t, regardless of what Debian et all decide to maintain, you MUST realize it’s a dying breed. Progress is something that happens. If you refuse to let go of the past and refuse to accept the reality of things, you alone must atone and face the consequences for your irresponsible decisions. If it’s something you wouldn’t put up with at work or in a professional setting, would bother with it at home? Just put an end to it and rest. Move on or be left in the dated books with all the other relics.
To be fair, nobody was surprised or angry about Ubuntu dropping support for 32-bit hardware. They’re not the first distro to do so, and really is time.
The problem is their initial announcement made it sound like they were dropping all support for 32-bit software as well, and even when they explained their intended solution it was pretty obvious it wouldn’t actually work.
Thankfully, due to the public outcry they have committed to putting an actual functional solution for support for legacy software into at least 19.10 and 20.04. That wasn’t a given though, and people’s concerns were well founded.
@Bry, it isn’t an ‘obsession’. There is plenty of 32-bit hardware out there that still works. It is long paid for. 64-bit replacements aren’t free. (though you may think they are cheap, that is relative) Complete lack of 32-bit support will hit poorer countries and mom&pop businesses hard. Many schools, especially in non-1st-world countries are using donated 32-bit hardware. There are economic considerations at play. Certainly, I’m not saying Canonical or the Mint team *has* to continue support. They are free to work on what they want or will. Debian will likely continue to offer 32-bit support for many years. The transition to a less-friendly distro won’t be easy for holdouts, but at least there is a path. Maybe by 2023, someone will make a noob-friendly Debian derivative for them.
Many thanks for your rather broad and insightful “watchful eye” on the roots of your product / Ubuntu. Its no secret that Ubuntu has long been rather arrogant in their relationship with their users. As I first began to be interested in getting rid of (fractured) Windows, then Ubuntu was rather popular, so I decided to try Ubuntu. It was rather slow then in response times, but I decided to continue with it. Then the direction of ubuntu started to change, yes that was many years ago, so I left Linux then for some years.
Now we see that as per your report this month, there are things to again be concerned about. Perhaps it will soon be worth while to be rid of Ubuntu and concentrate instead on Debian or whatever else …..
Thanks again
I would like to say that I concur with that view.
You guys are doing a PERFECT work. Long live Linux Mint!
Agree with Chuck, literally.
If Snaps or Flatpaks are forced upon me, I will leave Linux for good and embrace Windows 10. Fully.
How come?
Firefox is my primary browser, so if Chromium requires snap sometime in the future, it’s not a deal breaker for me. However, I do use Vivaldi, a Chrome/Chromium derivative, as my secondary browser. If that requires snap, I will have to see what other options I have. I really don’t want to be forced to install snap. My primary distro is Linux Mint Mate 18.3.
Mint just keeps getting better. It would take some fundamental change in the Mint philosophy to cause me to leave it. I can’t imagine what it would take to make me go back to Win* as my daily driver.
Meaning what exactly? You will embrace an OS that sucks in so many ways because?
Snaps would not be forced upon you because you’re a LMDE user.
So don’t worry, be happy.
I didn’t install any flatpaks via LMDE’s Software Manager, but I think it’s good that this option exist, if ever there were an app that you couldn’t find elsewhere, you could get it from within LMDE’s Software Manager.
Remember Flatpaks don’t come from Canonical.
So, because of one thing, you’re deciding to ditch a platform to another one that probably does worse and leaves you with even less control for what you can/can’t do? That makes sense. You obviously have your priorities straightened out. Nobody is “forcing” Snaps or Flatpaks on you. You can find distros that won’t do this.
Ich denke, das dir Microsoft bewußt oder unbewusst sehr viel mehr aufzwingt.
Gerade Windows 10 ist der beste Spion, den Microsoft je in Umlauf gebracht hat.
Ich persönlich besitze nicht einen PC mehr der mit Microsoft verseucht ist.
Bei mir läuft Linux Mint 19.
hoi Jaques,
I am administration a Windows-10-machine of my mother and I can only warn of Windows-10. It’s nothing more than a spybox! Three security-Questions right on Install where they ask you very personal things that don’t belong to Microsoft. For example: who is your oldes cousin, or what is your hometown and such things more. This is crazy and nothing more than espionage!!
Than after install, they force you upon Cortana which also spies like nothing..
I really hate Windows-10 and a fully embrace LinuxMint 19.1.
So much freedom, no espionage, no real problems…
You are already using WIn 10. You are a windows troll, and you are trying to give linux users non-sense reasons to switch to Winblows.
I suggest you add an application overview to cinnamon hotcorners just like in gnome shell for quicker access to apps. This would also give Cinnamon a modern outlook!
It already exists. You can simply enable that option with Cinnamon’s system settings
When linux mint 19.2 will be available
+1
I am glad you brought the Snap issue to my attention. I now need to learn more about it as your description does not sound good.
Hi and thanks for your awesome work! I’ve been using Linux Mint for 2 years continuously and it’s really great. I am glad to see all the amazing features you introduce in each release.
As for Snaps, I really don’t want them to replace deb packages. Snap may be good in some specific cases (mainly for proprietary software), but Snaps are terribly big compared to debs. I think it makes no sense to put Snaps where they are not required. As you mentioned, Debian package system was constructed for Free Software and does its job just fine.
I would be really unhappy to see basic apps like web browsers available only as Snap. If it happens in Ubuntu, I guess it might be the right time to switch to LMDE…
It might very well be. Debian will continue to embrace 32-bit systems as well. Debian 10 (Buster) is scheduled for release this coming Saturday and I am eagerly awaiting it 🙂
Agree with both of you.
If Snap would simply become an optional store you could install to get ONLY commercial software, it would be well received. And would promote the development of commercial software for Linux.
This future Clem warns of is extremely scary. I will likely go to LMDE should this happen.
I agree about snaps. I run LM in a triple-boot system on a 320GB HDD and I can’t give Linux more then 160GB of storage (I also have cm-x86 on the same parititon as Linux, which makest the sorage problem even worse). If everything moved to snaps and flatpaks, I would need a new HDD/SSD to hold all my programs.
Thank you or all your hard work! The Nemo and file associations tweaks are excellent.
Quick question: Will you still be offering the lower price NUCs? The new Mintbox looks awesome, but a little pricey for me.
Hi,
Thanks to all team and contributors for efforts.
You didn’t mention Nemo’s that feature; inherit view of parent directory.
Best regards from Türkiye.
All the Mint team, great thanks for what you do for us. Happy to see that you keep improving what already exists on Linux Mint, that’s the way to go, IMHO.
Thank you! These types of comments are always appreciated.
Yes, I agree!
Thank you so much for all this work, with this high quality. High exigency and humble vision !
hi Grigoriy
I totally agree to you!! LinuxMint is so nice and easy to use and it means so much freedom… Just great. Yes, keep LinuxMint up and let it go on.
Just one Question: how to install Cinnamon-Desktop alongside Mate-Desktop in LinuxMint 19.1 and how to switch to Cinnamon-Desktop??
Thank you…
@Andrea Koth Type “sudo apt install cinnamon” into the terminal and then click the icon next to your name on the login page to switch DE’s.
And when is Nemo finally able to search for a word inside a text file? For example, by writing a “sea” and showing me all the files that this word has. Dolphin KDE can do this for a long time, already in the Nautilus Gnome 3 has such functionality. You when ???
very important feature, also in odt pdf docx … files
And when will Texteditor being able to search in all open files? KDE Kate can do this.
Better search options in Nemo would be fine. Search in Dolphin works much better for me.
Functionality of KDE Okular in Cinnamons Pdf-Viewer and I have no more complaints.
…until now.
I miss KDE. All manuals for changing to KDE didn’t work. Always something is missed.
@Lyubomir
sudo apt install catfish
Enjoy.
Lyubomir, why don’t you just use Double Commander, a clone of Total Commander? Version 0.8.2.1 is in the repository, the current portable version that I use is 0.9.3. It’s perfect. It gives you dozens and hundreds of possibilities, searching for a word or a phrase in file-types you specify included.
Nemo CAN search for a word in a text file via Actions very easily.
In the Linux Mint Forum there is now a special topic for sharing such Nemo Actions: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=213&t=291571
You can use some and even make your own by modifying an existing one such as “Search Text in Directory”.
@Lyubomir and @ibis
That’s the exact reason why I switched to Kubuntu after Mint dropped KDE.
Meanwhile using Kubuntu 19.04 and through the backports I updated my system to Plasma 5.16 and it’s so amazing, with all the customizations that are possible compared to cinnamon and also the Plasma improvements they accomplished. Looks really really polished now.
I still miss Mint for various things. The enthusiasm of the developers and the community mainly, but these things don’t make up (for me) for what is missing since they dropped KDE. Cinnamon is just no option. And now seeing Plasma 5.16 in action, there isn’t any motivation at all to change to cinnamon just to get Mint. Mint would have been so amazing with Plasma 5.16.
But it is as it is, and no KDE, therefore no Mint for me. I didn’t want to rely on a system that I need for my daily work using an “unofficial” DE (in this case KDE), because if you run into problems, you are mostly on your own, and so Kubuntu was my logical choice, and now after having been using it for more than a year as my daily driver without issues (18.04, 18.10, 19.04) I can only say that I don’t regret it.
Again, it is hard work, and foresight like this that makes me glad to be a Mint Linux user. The Mint Team is the best.
hi Robert E. Murphy
“The Mint Team is the best.”
yes, completely true!!
Greetings!!
First, thank you Clem, and all of the other Linux Mint devs for all that you do for us. This is a great distro and I very much appreciate all of the hard work that you all put into it. Second, I find it very concerning how forcefully Canonical is trying to push Snaps, I have for a little while now actually. Aside from the obvious “gate-keeper” implications of Snaps being forced down our throat by Canonical, they’re just not a very good packaging system as they are right now. They’re slow to launch, take up a ton of room, and typically can be difficult to theme properly. Has there been any discussion of possibly reviving the LMDE project? Anyway, those are just my personal thoughts, keep up the great work, I’ll be eagerly anticipating 19.2!
First of all, thanks, thanks and again thanks. You’ve been doing a really great job and we’ve been using LM for ten years. We wish we could help or reward you in a more some useful manner. At least, this words may do it a little.
I agree with Pawel: “I would be really unhappy to see basic apps like web browsers available only as Snap. If it happens in Ubuntu, I guess it might be the right time to switch to LMDE…”
I feel Canonical is getting away from Free Software philosophy and Debian is rock solid. I would bet on LMDE. I’ve never tried it and, probably, it’ll be time to do it.
Hello Clem and other Mint heroes!
I just read most of the above story and am very pleased with what I saw.
First, those improvements like in Nemo, they are exactly on target. Bravo!
I then read the Snap story and can only completely agree.
Don’t know if it meant to be the same, but your efforts on LMDE next to the standard releases make sense. Sort of the same issue, I guess. Just in case some software supply dries up, there is always another way.
That said… currently I am on Cindy (the software, not the person) and have Mint MATE as a second. They share a common /home partition, which works well. (A clean Debian using XFCE also hangs in there)
I am sure that those changes in Nemo will surely reach LMDE too.
Well done.
Well done.
Really.
Great stuff, keep this up!
Regards,
Eric (the Netherlands)
Whats going on with mint mate edition? Anything new in pipeline?
If canonical is not dropping support for 32 bit then why drop the 32 bit build of mint …
Let it continue.
As Clem mentioned above, Canonical *will* be dropping Ubuntu support for 32-bit going forward, apart from the most-used libraries that support major software packages such as Steam and Wine. It would be impossible for Mint to fill the gap, which is why others have suggested a move to being based on Debian, i.e. a move to LMDE, so that full 32-bit support is maintained. I think this shows why the LMDE release is so important, but at the moment there is more gain than pain from following the Ubuntu long-term releases. If that pain ever increases above a certain threshold, and Mint’s resources are unable to reduce that pain sufficiently, then that is a separate matter. All in my opinion of course.
hi sagsaw
completely true!! I also hope, that MATE will live on in future. MATE is one of the best desktop-environments.
Hello, very thanks for LinuxMint!
Do you consider the possibility of making a mode for touchscreen computers? I use the ZorinOs 15 on my Lenovo Yoga, which works pretty well, but still contains some bugs, I find Mint better finished and stable, but I can not use it in touch mode (screen configuration , rotation, virtual keyboard!).
Thank you.
Boa tarde, quando sera lançado o Linux 19.2 ?
Confusing statements and nothing about the release date on the 19.2. Please care more about the monthly news because whoever likes Mint would be disappointed with such things.
In what way do you find the statements confusing?
As far as I am aware, Mint does not normally announce release dates in advance, except in general terms, because the philosophy is “it will be released when it is deemed ready”, *not* “we’ll release it at an arbitrary date whether it is ready or not”. And that is the way it should be. You will notice that there is more precision in the expected release date the further the release process advances. The beta hasn’t even been released yet.
The .2 releases always come out in July unless something blocks the release. It will be ready when it ready, not when it is still buggy.
@Pete
The statement starts appreciating the supporter, It is Ok. Then start to talk about future change mostly in cinnamon. We wait one month to read the monthly statement and accept that this time seems to be written by somebody who was in a hurry even after a delay to release it at least in Jun. Even though, I think every new version should have a release day even an expected date.
Sorry I have to disagree,. The LM philosophy is “we will release it when it is ready”. I would far rather have a well sorted and well tested release of software than a buggy release that had been forced through before it was ready just to meet an arbitary date. On a different note, personally I find the monthly updates clear and concise, and very informative, but not confusing
@Shahab, I don’t agree with your opinion. I like Mint and I found this monthly news very interesting and a little disturbing but certainly not disappointing. I don’t like snap or flatpak and if Cannonical abandons the free software philosophy I’ll probably switch to LMDE. As for 19.2, it will be ready when it is ready and when it is I’ll see it pop up in my update manager. I don’t want it until it is ready. While you are entitled to your opinion please remember that it is merely your opinion and please don’t presume to speak for “whoever likes Mint”.
Who will distribute the Mintbox 3 in the US?
MintBox3 will be available through Amazon in the US (worldwide shipping) and directly from Compulab.
Hi Clem ! Are the recent Mutter improvements (brought by Canonical’s Daniel Van Vugt) regarding input latency, nvidia drivers support, and overall smoothness being brought as well ? 🙂 (they are part of the next Gnome version).
Cheers !
The up-coming Cinnamon optimizations are really exciting. I think the feel of a desktop environment greatly contributes to a user’s experience and enjoyment. There wasn’t anything wrong with Mint as it was, but smoother and snappier is always better. So thank you for your efforts.
The previously introduced “easy installation of a Japanese IME” was also really exciting addition to me. It’s something I always use, so it getting easier, and the Mint Team’s attention, was a nice surprise.
I like the stance the Mint Team is taking when it comes to Snaps. Even if unintentional, I don’t like the idea of technology that restricts people’s freedom to associate and freedom to choose. I feel something like “Vender lock-in” is contrary to diverse healthy Linux communities.
Sorry if this is not the place for this, but what are the odds of getting a “next wallpaper” option when using the “play backgrounds as a slideshow” setting? This could be a hot corner option, or a desktop right click context menu item that only shows when the “background slideshow” option is used. As a not too distant convert of another OS, it’s about the only feature I really miss.
The slideshow controls are already implemented in Cinnamon. Just add the slideshow controls applet to the taskbar. Everything you need is in it, just right click on the applet to show the options.
Right on. Thank you. I never noticed that add-on before.
I’ve used the marvelous UI settings capability of Cinnamon to adjust how my system looks. Thus far I’ve found no way to adjust the UI appearance of applications installed through Snaps, Flatpaks, or AppImages. For the most part, they look like old DOS applications. AS to the “danger” Snaps, etc., may pose to APT, I have to confess inadequate understanding of Linux beneath the hood to foresee that. If the “new” reality is a bunch of applications in packages that are unresponsive to user UI prefs, that’s a threat to my desktop experience. On the other hand, if Snaps, etc., bring broader – even commercial – software choices to Linux, isn’t that for the better?
We users of Mint are downstream from Canonical and beneficiaries of what positive that company has done. How can we be upset that Canonical’s vision for Snaps is at least partly commercial and not 100% supportive of “free” when one of the features that first brought Mint to large awareness was the ability to easily install proprietary codecs?
I don’t care if Fedora users who want to install the commercial service Spotify are directed to a website owned by Red Hat’s primary competitor and may see there an ad for the company that’s sponsoring the hosting and delivery of a Snap they want. If that’s a big concern for the Fedora Community, can’t they create and maintain their own library of Snaps?
You are missing the point. Fedora was just an example. the point is that Ubuntu using snap can lock down users to its platform using the snap stores. It is not about the Fedora user. Its about every user that might prefer a different distro but is coerced to Ubuntu because the only choice he has for some apps would be snaps that only work with the Ubuntu Store. You can find yourself in such as situation as all of us.
This is the the whole point: * When Flatpak came out it immediately allowed anyone to create stores. The Flatpak client can talk to multiple stores. Spotify is on Flathub and they can push towards it. If tomorrow they have an argument with Flathub they can create their own store and the very same Flatpak client will still work with it. When Snap came out, it was only a client. The server was behind closed doors and the client couldn’t talk to multiple servers*
HOWTO: Host your own SNAP store!
https://ubuntu.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store
The answer is really quite simple… SNAP stores are really just HTTP web servers! Of course, you can get fancy with branding, and authentication, and certificates. But if you just want to host SNAPs and enable downstream users to fetch and install software, well, it’s pretty trivial.
In fact, Bret Barker has published an open source (Apache License) SNAP store on GitHub. We’re already looking at how to flesh out his proof-of-concept and bring it into snapcore itself.
Here’s a little HOWTO install and use it > details in blog linked above
Thank you for exposing these problems. This is very serious and you were so brave for doing this, specially for taking the stand! It seems to me that Canonical’s wrong decisions are more frequent and less “innocent” each day goes by.
Making LMDE was a very smart decision!!!
Keep up the good work!!
Ohh .. and BTW, awesome work as always! App source label is the kind of refinement that I’m used to see with Mint (double line hour / clock on side short panel is unique!). Custom menus will be very handy! And optimizations are always welcome.
Ι used to translate the blog in Greek the last years. Here is the translation in the new home
https://linux-user.gr/t/linux-mint-ta-nea-toy-ioynioy-2019/750
Fantastic! We have to translate some items back to English to understand them. For example, I just learned that “gramme cylisis” is a scrollbar (!!). Thanks for not transposing “snaps” to “stigmiotypa”.
Looking forward to the changes in the menu, nemo and scrollbar management they sound like some of these many small quality of life improvents that make Cinnamon/LM such a joy to use! It’s these little details that made me fall in love with Mint a some years back and they are what is keeping me here still.
Not a big fan of either Snaps or Flats (the only thing that worked without hitches for me so far have been Appimages) and I don’t like their wastefulness in general, but you are raising some very valid concerns on top here. This should be stopped before it’s becomes a real issue.
Its better to base on debian than Ubuntu, it’s turning into Microsoft evilness .
Exactly!!!
Correct.
hello,
as a counter measure to ubuntu chromium, wouldn’t it be possible to replace future ubuntu chromium package,
with chromium package from debian ?
Some time ago Ubuntu became the least open of all linux systems. Clem, I think you should seriously consider that the base for Linux Mint 20, be Debian instead of Ubuntu, with some kind of rolling release.
Maintaining the base of Linux Mint with Ubuntu, is to submit to the whims of a company, which each time brings less to the Linux community.
I understand that the change of the base Ubuntu to Debian, is much more work, but also implies more freedom.
Personally I’m strongly considering switching to LMDE the next time I do a fresh install.
Like you, I have been seriously disturbed by the direction that Canonical has been heading in for some time. In the interest of securing the future long-term freedom of Mint, I feel that a switch to a Debian base should be seriously considered / investigated. It saddens me to think all of your years of hard work could over time be increasing undermined by Canonical own self-interest.
Keep up the great work, Clem and team.
If I understood correctly, in the future the snap store will install itself when someone tries to install chromium.
If a software installs itself when you believe you’re installing something else, that’s a virus, even more if it can install more software.
So the snap store will become virus-like sounds like the’re being inspired by windows tactics XD.
If this “worse case scenario” about snaps, Chromium, etc, Chromium can always be installed and updated in Mint via the Chromium Stable PPA. Just so you know.
I agree 100%!
I was testing Kubuntu 19.10 (development branch) and regular updates replaced chromium.deb package with chromium.snap2.
Now, every time I boot Kubuntu 19.10 (development branch) it takes some minutes running Snap-related tasks, with notable Network and CPU activity.
I will keep KDE Neon (Bionic) and Mint 18 KDE (Xenial) as long as possible, but no more Kubuntu itself.
The release date of Debian 10 Buster has been set to July 6, 2019.
Does the LMDE 3 Kernel rise to 4.19.0-4,
and whether the beta will be released after the upgrade.
Then each person reports the problems generated in the test,
shortening the debugging time and speeding up the development progress.
Thank you very much for your team’s efforts.
Thankyou for your hard work Clem!
And THANKYOU for reaffirming support for 32bit libraries. I don’t think some people fully understand the gravity of the situation and just how much *modern software* would be broken by dropping the 32bit libraries. I took a brief glance through my own Steam game library for example, only 1/6th of my library, and checked each game against pcgamingwiki to see which ones were 32bit and which ones were 64bit. I was shocked to not only discover about 10 games that were 32bit only, but also discover a game from 2017 that was 32bit only!
I think there’s been some confusion with many people not realising this isn’t the same as dropping 32bit versions of distros. Those 32bit libraries are necessary for a lot of software people are using right now today.
It’s also fantastic to see UI tweaks and improvements, the draw power of a good UX should never be underestimated.
You’re doing great work Linux Mint team, keep it up!
In the “Edit Startup Program” dialog in the “Startup Applications” utility, can you please add options to:
1. Minimized, Restored, Maximized the application;
2. Select which monitor to open the application on if there are multiple monitors; and
3. Choose which workspace (or available on all workspaces) the application is shown on.
For example, when the computer starts, users may like Thunderbird to open, but to open minimized. Useful if you take your computer to do presentations and you don’t want all your emails shown in full view to the audience when you turn on your computer.
What do you think?
Thank you
Nice idea. I’d love if there was an option to make sure Steam & Discord launches minimised, that would be fantastic.
That would helpful for me too. In Cinnamon I set up workspaces for different activities. Each time Cinnamon start up, I have to switch to the workspace where I read my mails and start up Thunderbird there manually.
@Grady @ttjimera Thank you for providing other use-cases. Hopefully other people can also provide some other use-cases to help with planning this if this were to be implemented.
We would use it also for the Jami application as it is a Skype replacement and also includes SIP capabilities.
https://jami.net/
@Clem is this something that would be implemented in Linux Mint? If so, would this be in Linux Mint 19.2 or is it too late?
Thank you
This is a really good idea, but sadly I think it might be more rather more difficult to implement than it at first appears.
I hope to see parrot-source added on Linux mint as a default source – packages
Anything new for MATE users?
Looking for a good VPN?
“A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO NO.”
I double down on this
Absolutely!
Will the vertical dark band which appears in scanning with LMCE 19 and LMCE 19.1 persist in LMCE 19.2 ?
To avoid it I have resorted to LMDE and/or Linux MX , both Debian based. I really liked LMCE up to 18.3.
@Patrick Donaghy.
Just the usual … Hardware & software settings please. 4k video display, on BTRFS?
hi, i am from Mexico and this is my first comment and is to say thank you Linux Mint team for your hard work on this usefull distro, i was been using this distro since 5 years ago, specifically i start with LM 17.1 when i was 17 years old (lol ) and since then my life has changed because i discovered another world, a world with a bunch of new knowledge about everything, commands, configurations, programming, and much more, thanks to it, i decided to study the systems engineer career, today, i am close to graduating and proudly to use LM !!!, really i am very grateful for give me the opportunity to enter this wonderful world. Thank you Linux Mint team!.
WOW!!! That’s awesome 🙂 Congrats to you.
As we all know, many install Mint for their parents. Airtop 3 would be a bit of overkill for that. Maybe release ODROID-N2 with Mint-themed case and preinstalled Mint in partnership with Hardkernel? That would be literally ten times cheaper and still plenty fast for browsing web, checking e-mails, using office editors, etc. So it also would be good option for office work.
What you think? Hardkernel is aim for full upstream support since Linux 5.3, btw.
P.S. I using slower ROCKPro64 with Armbian and Mate on top, and I can confirm that it’s still more than enough for parents/office tasks, and ODROID-N2 is even faster and have better support in upstream 🙂
ODROID-N2 would not be a candidate until Linux Mint is ported to ARM, but maybe ODROID-H2 can be considered.
The right MintBox to compare against in this case would be MintBox Mini 2 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3528
Best regards,
Irad Stavi, Compulab
I hope there will be an improvement on switching displays for laptops connected to external display, at least for Cinnamon.
On Windows 10, pressing “Super Key + P” opens a menu to select “PC Screen Only”, “Duplicate”, “Extend” and “Second Screen Only. And when an external monitor is connected before boot, “Duplicate” is selected by default.
On Ubuntu (GNOME), pressing “Super Key + P” also opens up a GUI menu (for a user to select) similar to Windows and when an external monitor is connected before boot, “Extend” is selected by default.
But on Mint Cinnamon (and Manjaro Cinnamon), pressing “Super Key + P” doesn’t display any menu. It just auto switch to whatever settings (I can’t remember the default order), and when an external monitor is connected before boot “Extend” is also selected by default, only on my laptop, Laptop’s screen is blank while it shows as extension on external monitor, I’m not sure if this is a bug on the “Extend” settings or just on my laptop. And you have to press the “Super Key + P” several times to get what you want, there’s no GUI to select what settings.
I think this is the right time for Debian.
You don’t leave your partner because they squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end. You leave them because the relationship is irrevocably broken and unsustainable. We are absolutely nowhere near that point yet, and hopefully never will be. You can use LMDE if you so desire.
Linux Mint can be used at home but it’s difficult to use it at work (and that’s the same for all Linuxes) because of lack of easy integration in a Domain. A graphical tool would be very interesting to add a computer into a domain, to acces to shared folders…
Just install Samba. Problem solved.
First & the foremost, my heartiest congrats to the Clem & LinuxMint Team! Excellent work! Keep it up!
I started my switch (from Win) back from days of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, explored LinuxMint 12 and later my primary desktop environment IS LinuxMint starting from version 13!
LinuxMint team is highly appreciable for Desktop UI/UX refinements in recent releases, although I feel that the distro suffered from Ubuntu problems in post LM 17.3 era! Although LM 17.3 was the smoothest but LM 19.1 is much snappier and less resource intensive and its great to know that LM 19.2 is building on it!
As for the statement, “A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO NO”, it is absolutely critical that:
a) Linux Disto Families (RedHat family, Ubuntu family) MUST stay independent of each other in terms of package management, however, cross-package interoperability is definitely a plus!
b) Free or paid software is not the issue here, but any snaps replacing deb package is A CLEAR VIOLATION OF LINUX PACKAGE MANAGEMENT NORMS & MUST BE DEALT ACCORDINGLY WITH IRON HANDS IF NEEDED!
I use & recommend Linux Mint Mate 32bit for low-specs PC of friends (as a social work) who want to get rid of Windows so 32bit environment IS HIGLY SIGNIFICANT FOR SUCH USERS. Apart from that, Wine, Steam and similar projects rely on i386 architecture and should NOT BE LEFT ON THE DISCRETION OF CANNONICAL TO STAY ALIVE OR DIE. Its fantastic, hard work from their respective teams! To me, Ubuntu to drop 32bit support is just like “Unity” desktop affair, where a new desktop & mobile ecosystem was on the verge of development when it was “forcefully murdered” by Cannonical! Last but not the least, dropping 32bit support is like depriving poor people from “virus free PC environment with Linux” and it is even worse then that it sounds!
Last but not the least, I think LMDE 3 is another really well built distro with tremendous scope for the future! I believe that with the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, LinuxMint team will be in a clear position to decide whether a shift to Debian 10 base has become inevitable or not! I would humbly suggest that some effort on LMDE 3 should continue from LinuxMint team as Debian 10 base will give the following “real” advantages:
a) Snap not crossing the limits (even when Cannoical does!) in terms of package management norms!
b) 32bit support continues with LinuxMint!
Long live ALL LINUXMINT TEAM! Stay safe, be happy & enjoy your life!
Please Linux Mint, leave ubuntu and go ahead with LMDE. There’s really no reason to waste your time and efforts with Canonical unpopular decisions. I have just installed Debian 10 beta, Cinnamon edition and it’s fantastic, everything functions “out of the box”. I only miss x-apps, they are not on debian repos. Linux Mint based on debian should be the way to go.
Hi bobzr, where from did you downloaded “Debian 10 beta, Cinnamon edition”? Like to try it, but found only 9.9 edition. Thanx for any info in advance.
fofrot, you can download the Debian install disc on this link (weekly-builds -> amd64 -> iso-cd) and choose Cinnamon during installation. :
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCD/ReleaseTesting/Buster_r0
For at least two of the x-apps there are better alternarives IMHO:
Instead of Xplayer, use mpv Player.
Instead of Pix, use gThumb.
In LMDE2, gThumb was the default app for light image editing. This was changed to Pix (which is an x-app) in LMDE3.
I just wanted to see what Debian Cinnamon edition looks live and downloaded this: https://cdimage.debian.org/images/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-testing-amd64-cinnamon.iso
Testing live USB I’ve got stuck without internet because apparently my laptop wifi card is not recognized without non-free drivers.
Otherwise it looks OK although one would need a lot of additional installation and customization to make it look like Linux Mint Cinnamon edition.
bonjour Clem et merci pour tout le travail effectué. je trouve linux Mint très stable et très sympathique.
Je précise tout de suite que je suis débutant sur linux Mint.
Je voudrais vous poser une question. Voilà j’utilise linux Mint et l’ application scratch (programmation pour les jeunes), mais j’ai remarqué que dans vos dépôts officiels il est proposé uniquement la version ancienne scratch 1.4. serait-il possible de mettre à jour cela: passer à la version scratch 2.0 ou 3.0 ? Le problème vient sûrement d’adobe air (application propriétaire) ? Cette application est très utilisé en France dans tous les collèges et lycée. Y- a t-il une solution simple pour installer scratch 2.0 ou 3.0 sur un ordinateur.
ce n’est sûrement pas votre priorité, mais cela pourrait aider à démocratiser Mint.
Remarque : je trouve qu’il n’y a pas assez de tutoriels en français, de livres écrits en français (pour les débutants) pour nous aider à démocratiser Linux Mint. C’est dommage !
Merci à toute votre équipe pour tout le travail accompli.
Scratch 3.0 est écrit en HTML5/Javascript. Sous Linux, vous ne pouvez actuellement l’utiliser que directement dans votre navigateur. Évidemment, il n’y a plus de paquets d’installation pour cela.
Let me add to the chorus of users here thanking Clem for voicing so openly and so frankly the team’s concerns with e g, Snap, which, it would seem, is on the way to attempting to attain a monopoly status under Canonical. Not good – perhaps, as some posters here have urged, the time has come to base LM directly on Debian, rather than forking from Ubuntu long-term builds ? I presume that would involve large changes to the look and feel of LM, which might at first users like myself a tad unhappy – I came to LM from Ubuntu (via Cinnamon) – but if doing so is necessary to avoid a situation of Canonical dominance, then so be it….
With regard to dropping 32-bit support in Linux Mint, allow me to point out that one of the things I have found most appealing about Linux Mint is that is so handy in making computers on which versions of Windows which have reached their best before date useful again. I work with pensioners who in such cases either ask me to install LM on their old devices, or opt to purchase a new computer with the latest Windows version pre-installed and who often, in that case, give me their old machine, on which I then install LM and with a little help from my friends ship to a school on Mindanao in the Philippines. While I can understand that it makes since for LM to ditch 32-bit support in LM 20 (and essentially all the laptops concerned now have 64-bit processors), I shall be sad to see it go….
Greatly looking forward to LM 19.2 ; I check every day to see if its been released – but I fully agree with the LM philosophy ; viz, the date of release is determined by when the version is finished, and not the other way ’round….
As always, many, many thanks to Clem and his team ; may I ask if it is possible to contribute in EUR rather than in USD, as the banks here rip one off terribly when converting to USD, while EU regulations prevent them from doing the same when converting to EUR ?
Henri
Let me add to the chorus of users here thanking Clem for voicing so openly and so frankly the team’s concerns with e g, Snap, which, it would seem, is on the way to attempting to attain a monopoly status under Canonical. Not good – perhaps, as some posters here have urged, the time has come to base LM directly on Debian, rather than forking from Ubuntu long-term builds ? I presume that would involve large changes to the look and feel of LM, which might at first make users like myself a tad unhappy – I came to LM from Ubuntu (via Cinnamon) – but if doing so is necessary to avoid a situation of Canonical dominance, then so be it….
With regard to dropping 32-bit support in Linux Mint, allow me to point out that one of the things I have found most appealing about Linux Mint is that is so handy in making computers on which versions of Windows which have reached their best before date usablel again. I work with pensioners who in such cases either ask me to install LM on their old devices, or opt to purchase a new computer with the latest Windows version pre-installed and who often, in that case, give me their old machine, on which I then install LM and with a little help from my friends ship to a school on Mindanao in the Philippines. While I can understand that it makes since for LM to ditch 32-bit support in LM 20 (and essentially all the laptops concerned now have 64-bit processors), I shall be sad to see it go….
Greatly looking forward to LM 19.2 ; I check every day to see if its been released – but I fully agree with the LM philosophy ; viz, the date of release is determined by when the version is finished, and not the other way ’round….
As always, many, many thanks to Clem and his team ; may I ask if it is possible to contribute in EUR rather than in USD, as the banks here rip one off terribly when converting to USD, while EU regulations prevent them from doing the same when converting to EUR ?
Henri
@RussianNeuroManceru:
I second your idea. Even my Raspberry Pi (Mate 18.04) fulfills basic tasks of reading mail, accessing the
Internet and doing (small) editing of documents.
An ODROID-N2 would be a much faster replacement for this purpose, I guess.
I left Ubuntu since the radical change of the UI to Unity (after 10.04) and my opinion about canonical changed at that time. Now, seeing their intentions with Snap, it seems, my opinion was right, even at that time.
Using Linux Mint from Maya (13) and now 19.1 on all PCs (all 64-bit and quad-core, even on an Atom-based PC).
I am happy with most of the work of the Mint team – except for a broken display of the “Network settings” UI. Just the upper half of the dialog is shown on all my 1920×1080 screens.
Anyway: Thanks a lot for your work and your attempts to listen to the users without a need to do surveys,etc. like Canonical had to do.
Regards
Norbert
Maybe it is time to say goodbye to Canonical and base Mint on Arch.
Mint already has another version based on Debian just in case they’d have to drop the Ubuntu binaries as a base already so I seriously doubt they’d consider yet another version based on Arch. As far as a user-friendly Arch based distros are concerned, Manjaro has that covered nicely.
After reading about Snap and Canonical I can only say that I am so glad I made the switch to LMDE already years ago. I actually have the Chromium browser installed from the LMDE repository. Firefox and Opera Stable (the latter from Opera repository) is also installed. I think these three browsers are the best browsers out there, with their own set of weaknesses and strengths.
I really appreciate that you adress the problems with snaps. For me, traditional package systems have always worked great, so I have always felt both snap and flatpack to be a solution without a problem. Personally I’d much prefer to have a single system of APT and nothing else – all in one place: easy to use, secure and practical.
I don’t get it, when some years ago Red Hat was dominating server market and through ‘connections’ vendors were producing only RPM’s and no DEB’s (drivers, software for desktops), everything was fine. I recall that even Libre Office at the beginning had no DEB package and I’ve been told on some forum or IRC to use Fedora/Centos or similar RPM distro. I felt bad, but it was fine back then. When DEB’s are being chosen by Spotify that produce no RPM’s, then it’s a problem. Hmm…
I do understand however, that freedom is important. I’m just not sure why Fedora folks cannot see a banner or text that says, that it’s not due to Fedora team (that could build a package for the distro) but instead someone else did that and it could be appreciated and noticed.
Challenge me on this one please, as I’d like to know, why should I respect someone who does not respect me. or at least why I cannot say that it was thanks to my team that did something.
I’m not a developer, just curious.
It seems that ever since Canonical and Microsoft jumped into bed together, that Microsoft’s character, personality, and mindset have all rubbed off on Canonical. The very things I absolutely hated and loathed about the Windows eco-system, Canonical is now trying one way or another to bring to the Linux eco-system. Lock everything down and corner the market so that everyone has no option but to use your product? Grow up Canonical. You’re really NOT that important, so stop acting like the tyrant you’re in bed with who’s undoubtedly screwing you without you even realising it. You’re currently a disgrace to your own chosen brand name; “Ubuntu” which means “humanity towards others.” You’re acting the very opposite of that, and more like an apprentice dictator to your beloved master Microsoft.
Wow. Talk about an abusive over-reaction. “Apprentice dictator”. “Disgrace”. “Tyrant”. Cooperation on a given project being termed “jumping into bed together”. We in the Linux world have to stop this divisive slagging off of other distros and general over-reaction to events. We should aim to cooperatively resolve issues in a cool-headed manner, using the freedom and choice that Linux offers us to do so. Please wind in the negative rhetoric – it does no-one any good.
@ Pete, That”s you’re opinion, and you’re entitled to it …just as I’m entitled to mine. Some people might remember the “Windows 10 will be free for a year” thing that Microsoft pulled. I remember saying at the time “What are they up to? They NEVER give anything away for free,” and and having to dodge all the fallout and flak that was generated because of what I said. Now we know why? It was so that they could get as many people onto Windows 10 as possible, to spy on them and make money off their data. If you think that by buying Github, releasing some (lots) of previously hidden code, and putting the Linux kernel into their own Operating System that the company who called Linux “a cancer” has changed their mind about that, and are now Linux’s best friend, dream on. If Microsoft love open source now so much, then why isn’t Windows open sourced? No! Microsoft don’t care about Linux, you, me, or even Canonical. Microsoft only care about Microsoft’s bank balance. They’re a business, and businesses only go into business to make money, period. All the rhetoric and spin the spew out is only to make themselves look favourable …as are any “favours” they may do along the way, but at the end of the day, they’re only interested in making money and eliminating any competition, so that they can make even more money. That’s what businesses do …not just Microsoft. That’s what Canonical is trying to do now with this Snaps package garbage idea they’ve come up with. But just to clarify; making money doesn’t make you a tyrant. How you go about it does. And yes, figuratively speaking, they [Canonical and Microsoft] have jumped into bed together.
I am with Lord Mozart on this one. Very well said Sir!
Hi Lord Mozart,
Just wanted to say I congratulate you and agree literally. The situation couldn’t be told better .
@ Pete
So you “aim to cooperatively resolve issues in a cool-headed manner”, don’t you, Pete? Well, I don’t know where you live and how come that you haven’t understood capitalism yet, but the latter is deplorable.
Microsoft is a highly aggressive, highly capitalistic enterprise that has one goal only: Dominating the private sector and making money, as much as ever possible. Or, to quote Lord Mozart: “Microsoft … are a business, and businesses only go into business to make money, period.” Plus – which Lord Mozart hasn’t mentioned – Microsoft has circa 70.000 employees. So with whom in that economic empire would you want to resolve issues “cooperatively”?
Or with whom at Canonical, a “… privately held computer software company founded and funded by … ENTREPRENEUR Mark Shuttleworth to market COMMERCIAL support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects.”? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) Do you really believe that they are willing to resolve issues “cooperatively” with you, Clem or other Minters? Problems that they have created themselves? Aren’t they rather willing to gain domination in a market sector? Re-read Clem’s deliberations on their business methods and you’ll know.
It’s true that Lord Mozart’s use of language is neither academic nor sophisticated or whatsoever which makes it easy to tackle him. However, he boils down things to an essence, and that’s superb. I like his unobstructed directness and his candour, and I agree expressly to what he wrote.
@Pete the only abusive over-reaction I see here is yours. And a whole lot of it again and again, to boot. Looks like it’s time to put Greasemonkey to good use once more.
I wish you would launch a KDE version again. 🙁
Try this:
Download KDE Neon.
Add Linux Mint Main repo to KDE Neon.
http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/l/linuxmint-keyring/linuxmint-keyring_2016.05.26_all.deb
https://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/mint_main
Then install Linux Mint packages like X-Apps, Software Manager, Update Manager, etc. on KDE Neon.
Try this in VirtualBox first to see if it works.
Why would they do that? Linux Mint excels because of Cinnamon not because of KDE. Linux Mint is based off of Ubuntu, so if you’re bleeding your heart out simply because of a desktop then go try something else like what Anon mentioned. The next best thing would be KDE Neon. Stop asking for things that don’t need to happen.
1- Not a must, but preferably download Mint XFCE.
2- Add Kubuntu repos: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/ppa
3- sudo apt update && sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop kscreen plasma-pa plasma-nm -y
That’s it .
Logout and when logging back in, click on the desktop switcher icon and choose Plasma, type your password and go on…
You can even remove Xfce DE later if you like..
__________________________________________________________________
P.S.
1- If you want the latest Plasma, then add also: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
2- Should you have any problems with the window bar & themes : sudo apt install kwin qml-module-org-kde-kcm
If only there was a community dedicated to curated Snap, Flatpak and AppImage packages much like Arch repos/AUR or any community driven Linux distro with its curated packages.
This way we would have community driven Snap, Flatpak and AppImage packages corporations like Canonical, Redhat, etc. don’t have any control over.
People would donate to community dedicated to curated Snap, Flatpak and AppImage packages just like people donate to any open source project. 🙂
Are you seriously trying to promote Arch in this issue? You must be joking.
Softpedia has daily lists of software, including Linux & its operating systems. However it is almost random in its collections in Linux; Windows operating systems are fairly complete at their web site. If it has enough $$ and management skills, they MIGHT be able to list & have the download addresses for Linux operating systems.
Personally the Softpedia web site is very messy to navigate. So it’s the chicken or the egg argument. Will increased $$ bring better management to them, or will better management bring an easier to navigate, more comprehensive web site.
if you stop supporting 32 bits Linux OS and applications for the 32 OS, all the user will stop their donations
That’s strong possibility.
32-bit packages can be provided by Snap, Flatpak and AppImage with all required dependencies so 32-bit software’s and games continue working even if OS drops 32-bit support.
I won’t. Clem’s judgement calls have been very good. And I’m old enough to remember the transitions from 8 but to 16 bit, and 16 bit to 32 bit. While things rarely die completely, the caravan does move on every so often. Nothing lasts forever.
It’s not up to Mint, it’s up to Ubuntu who already back-pedaled at least on dropping 32-bit libraries after a plethora of user response. Makes no sense to say “all user donations will stop when it wouldn’t be Mint’s fault.
You need to catch up with reality. This part of the world tends to move on, progress, and relinquish less effective technologies for obvious reasons. IF you can’t figure out those reasons, maybe you’re better of being put in a time capsule with the rest of the relics.
Cant wait. The Airtop 3 looks awesome. Loving the Mintbox Mini Pro 2, Compulab stuff is built tough. Starting to recommend they unit to customers, been beating a couple of them, they just work.
What is the programming language Nemo is written with?
C
C? Not even C++?!
Look at linuxmint/nemo in GitHub.
I advise you take a look at Cinamenu.
It’s a great Menu which seems better than the original Cinnamon Menu.
Other than that, keep up the good work and don’t forget Mint is the distro that is not afraid to move forward and inovate when that brings benefits to the end-user.
Hi Clem, and Michael,
‘Nemo: Conditional actions’ sounds very interesting. Will it provide a method to reintroduce the drag-and-drop context menu (Move Here, Copy Here, Link Here, Cancel), except this time using right click (matching Windows, and Xfce usability) as previously discussed (link)?
Not sure my use of the term ‘hooks’ In the previous discussion was correct, seen another developer use the term for something else.
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3661#comment-146457
On a basic level, will conditional actions allow simplification of, Rubbish Bin context menu, compare Xfce equivalent?
Many thanks to you both, and all Linux Mint developers, for your great work.
Looking forward to testing Linux Mint 19.2. 🙂
“We’re excited to get close to the BETA release and to show everybody what we’ve been working on.”
How much time is still awaited? One week, two weeks, or more?
Thank you!
Losing Chromium updates would be a huge deal and potentially force me to change distros, which I don’t want to do. But the fact is Chronium as my secondary browser is necessary for compatibility at times where Firefox doesn’t work right. I’d say Brave could be an alternative but it’s ridiculously behind schedule for v 1.0 and still has lots of bugs. Some form of Chromium with regular updates is vital.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Vivaldi and Opera, among others, are Chromium derivatives. Opera has both Snap and deb versions. My hope is that at least one of those derivatives will retain a deb version. I have no connection to any of these projects, so all I can do is hope.
I currently use Brave version 0.66.99 which is based on Chromium 75.0.3770.100, and I see that the latest Chromium version in the repositories is 75.0.3770.99.
I note a comment about porting LM to ARM processors – now that the Raspberry Pi 4 is released, I reckon a new market is opening up! Any chance . . ?
Good point. But supply seems limited. The 4Gb units sold out immediately. I suspect this will be a very big seller indeed.
Fully agree with this.
There Is A Serious Bug In The Latest mesa Update it affects The XFCE Edition of mint
when i install the update and restart the computer my panel is not showing up at all
my desktop icons do not show either switching to compton solved the problem
before i was using xfwm4+composting
packages included in the update are as fallows
libegl-mesa0 libegl-mesa0:i386 libegl1-mesa libgbm1 libgbm1:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa libglapi-mesa:i386 libgles2-mesa libglx-mesa0 libglx-mesa0:i386 libosmesa6 libosmesa6:i386 libwayland-egl1-mesa libwayland-egl1-mesa:i386
Can Someone Please fix this
i restored with Timeshift
and blacklisted the update everything if fine
could it be due to any missing packages or dependencies?
any info would be appreciated
Thank You
Sincerely Shawn
The same for me,
From Desktop Settings >>Manager>>Metacity + Compositing solve the problem after restart
Thanks Shawn,
It’s fixed: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=297222.
I don’t wanna use snap or flatpaks, sometimes I use appimage, but I hate snaps and flatpaks.
dear clem,
this is my last comment to you please kindly respond!!!!!!
i cannot copy files bigger than 2gb ..within two weeks of fresh copy installation….i can copy any size but after 2month going i can no longer copy larger files……when the copy slider gets to 99% it gets stucked there….it can stay on 99% for like 30 mins.anytime i see that i have to make fresh copy
my device specs are
Dell lattitude E6420
8GB ram
500hdd
please is there something im not doing right?
iyke, this is not a matter that needs Clem’s attention… post your question in the Linux Mint forums and you’ll get help.
i stated this issue in 2017..up to now no possible solution!
its better i go back to where i came from and smash..mint!
if you at least provide a link to that forum thread maybe someone can have a look at it, which requires more detailed information about your hardware and software.
Hi Iyke,
What about other file managers? Especially simple – lightweight ones ? Just to see what happens: pcman-fm etc. Or the ones working from Terminal..
Although this may not seem directly related (but since you state that there’s no problem when first installed), can you try to clean the system with Bleachbit (both as root and user) checking most of the boxes other than clean the remaining space on disk etc. .. and then try and see if it helps?
(In case of any good news, please let us know)
Hello Emin,
Thanks for your contribution i will give it a try
i will try caja,and packman
also i have bleach and tried cleaning wiith it
ufffffff this means a possible total way to the lmde version because we’re having a lot of frictions with the new ubuntu versions and one of them is the 32-bit loss those usury will have to switch to the lmde version or just debian and that would be a shame ,a council go even more polish the lmde version for possible change, it may be that something like hawei with google happens but of course otherwise it is only an example you understand me
Thanks for all your hard work.
I am not pleased with Canonical’s approach with snap, it puts too much power in their hands, that is not the future of open source.
I am glad to hear that the mint team is aware of this issue and prepared to respond.
I am looking forward to the coming update.
Hello, Clem & other Linux Minters:
Thank you for this informative and open monthly update. A few weeks ago, I had read about Canonical’s position on SNAPs and how it would affect Chromium. If I remember, correctly, I was taken aback when the Canonical spokesperson mentioned that the Chromium source change from .deb to SNAP was NOT up for a discussion; this was not what I expected from an open-source community (and from Linux, in general). I appreciate, respect, and donate to open-source projects; however, such “corporate-speak” (I know, Canonical is a corporation.) coming out of an open-source “discussion,” is disconcerting, to say the least. Therefore, I champion and echo Clem’s sentiments, regarding this latest news from Canonical, about the upcoming changes to Chromium. And, much like with the community response to 32-bit libraries being dropped from upcoming Ubuntu releases, anyone concerned about the upcoming Chromium changes, should also make their open-source voices heard to all those making such decisions. Likewise, thank you Clem, for highlighting this troubling issue and for making more open-source users aware of what is happening to our environment.
Regarding the upcoming Linux Mint release, as usual, WOW!!! Thank you, all, for your work on this incredible Linux distribution. I look forward to its release, as usual. 🙂
I write to put on record my strong hope that Clem and his highly accomplished team will be able to preserve the capabity run, via Wine, programs that use 32-bit and even 16-bit Windows programs. Many of my critical financial records are contained in a 16-bit program (viz., InCharge!) originally written in OS/2 and later transferred to Windows 95; I have kept these records in this program since 1995, so there are now records for over 23 years in this program. These records are vital to my wife and me for many purposes. PLEASE let me continue to access them from Linux Mint Cinnamon!!!
Oops! Meant to write “. . . preserve the capability to run, via Wine, . . .”
Given the recent reports of a fairly serious-sounding bug in a recent mesa update it would perhaps perhaps be worthwhile to consider keeping at least some update levels functionality, as beginner users encountering a serious bug without warning would probably be frightened off and go back to windows (or mac OS). Mint is, after all, generally considered to be beginner friendly, and so it seems a shame to get rid of one of the things that makes it that way. In my opinion, the update manager should not, by default, select updates that could cause major problems, and it should warn users to make sure they have a recent timeshift backup and know how to restore to it before they apply any dangerous update. While this might pose some security issues, if people become extra paranoid and don’t update dangerous packages, surely these could be reduced by having some sort of banner or notifications to remind people of the importance of security updates?
This should not deter people from applying updates, it should just make sure they are aware of which updates might cause issues, and only apply those when they have the time to recover from them.
Perhaps an option to blacklist updates to packages unlikely to have vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely (eg GRUB) would also be good for stability for less experienced users.
Thank you for your work on an excellent distro.
Regressions are a real, there’s no question. The recent MESA regression is just a critical example of that, but we see regressions all the time, although usually with less impact. In rolling distributions critical regressions are part of the landscape. We just pushed a fix in cinnamon-session yesterday; Arch users could no longer log out. It happens all the time. By the time software goes through a BETA and gets onto a frozen base it’s much more mature than before, but there are still regressions going through. How do we tackle regressions? In the past we used levels. They helped to a certain extent and they were OK at the time because we didn’t have anything better. I think the biggest issue with levels was that they empowered users a lot but they didn’t bring enough guidance. The message was confusing because although we explained the nature of the issue very well (security vs stability), how to apply updates was something that was left up to users, and many users didn’t have a clue what to do. With the integration of system snapshots within the OS, all of sudden, we had a better solution in our hands, because we could, just like with levels, tackle both security and stability issues, but unlike what we had with the levels, we didn’t need users to think and form a strategy. The message was much simpler then: Update everything, always. Revert whenever you find an issue. We did leave levels in place for troubleshooting after a revert. We thought it would help at the time. It’s been a few releases now though and we know with feedback that this hasn’t been useful. Not only do people not send us feedback based on level filtering, they’re also quite good at identifying causes of regression without using levels. Take MESA for instance, it was identified as the regression issue almost immediately. We’re removing levels altogether in 19.2 because they’re not useful, because they’re also used in some places to implement a strategy which is now obsolete (applying updates by level preventively) and because they represent a lot of code and complexity within the mintupdate project. I understand that they can be missed. They really shouldn’t though. With timeshift integrated, detailed history of updates and the ability to block either a particular version or future updates for a given source package, we’ve a beautiful solution to software updates.
Timeshift can be configured in a (very) bad manner that can eat up all free drive space in a short time. I’ve read such reports in the forums and almost happened to me too. I uninstalled it completely and I won’t have it back.
Is there any alternative, like manually selecting and keeping old versions of possibly problematic packages, with an easy way to downgrade when needed? Synaptic does have a Force version option but it’s mostly useless in certain situations.
MX Linux has become a massive success by basing a solid Debian based OS with tools that take the “Ouch” out of the Debian Free Software quirkiness. LMDE already exists and would just need to work on tools, similar to what we have in the Ubuntu, to ease new users into the more difficult aspects of Linux like setting up drivers, or updating the system in a simple and understandable way.
I’d love to see Mint move over to a strictly Debian distro. Given the actions of Canonical as of the past few years, I am doubting the long term viability of Ubuntu as a Linux distro. I foresee, sooner rather than later, that they will fully branch off of the Linux community and become their own proprietary distro, similar to Android.
I completely agree with you about snap. Fortunately you develop LMDE; maybe part of the solution is improving relations with Debian. I appreciate so much your work, also your “phylosophical” work about trying to understand free software problems! Keep up the good work!
I f’ing love Linux Mint.
Only a humble suggeston to Mint Team:
Thank you for everything. And ok, it will be “when it’s ready”.
This time, it’s obvious that there’ll be a sudden increase in the number of LMDE users. So, please attach more importance to LMDE than ever and make LMDE4 available as soon as possible. (yes, I know it’s not that simple, and you’re so busy, especially nowadays, and respect so much) as Debian Buster is coming this week..
With Buster RC1, Debian now has secure-boot support. Which means machines which have the secure-boot bit turned on in the machine should be easily able to install Debian on such machines. No need to disable or workaround Secure boot anymore 🙂
https://itsfoss.com/debian-10-buster/
Enhorabuena, por vuestro excelente trabajo. Llevo con Linux como unos 3 años más o menos y con Linux Mint hará 3 meses.
Vengo de deepin, tuve que desinstalar lo porque me daba problemas y las actualizaciones iban lentas.
Hi!
Yesterday’s mesa update broke xfwm4 + Composit (and the panel) for me, it doesn’t start anymore in that combination (symptoms: no window decorations, all windows overlaid and cannot be moved, Alt+Tab broken, no panel).
Does anyone know more?
Workaround:
I switched to Metacity + Composite, which looks almost the same:
* Alt + F2,
* click into the text field
* type xfce4-settings-manager
* Enter
* in the settings mananger, find Desktop settings
* choose a different window manager, or just turn off composite
Moini yesterday I had the exact same problem as you Thank You For Pointing This Out To People I much appreciate that
it is in fact the latest mesa update that caused the same issues you are having
fortunately for me i had a recent Timeshift Backup and restored it problem solved and i also blacklisted the update as well if you have a recent backup with Timeshift i would restore it and be sure in the update manager to blacklist the update labeled mesa
also if you can not do that you can if you want switch to Compton it looks the same as xfwm4 + Composting
Note To Clem Please fix this soon and could you let all of us know Thank You
Moini Is Your Graphics Card that you are using an Intel Card Or AMD Card
Mine Is an Intel Q43/Q45 Express chipset
this might have something to do with the mesa update since it has fixes for AMD
Shawn, yes, I have only on-board Intel graphics. I see now that there’s a downgrade available in the update manager for xfwm4, maybe that will fix it.
Yep, that seems to fix it. Didn’t reboot yet, but it works again for me at the moment, right after switching back.
Hi, in the future do you think you can release the most recent kernels as an option, I currently use Ukuu but it would be great if Mint had that option, it could separated as a risk but still as an option.
That Airtop3 is a little rich for my uses but I am totally drooling over the look of that case. Also the quiet, love fanless designs.
One of the big things I like about LM is Nemo and it’s integrations with things like gtkhash, image-resizing tools and whatnot. These latest upgrades sound even better + the ability to control certain files with my own scripts sounds really neat. Keep up the good work guys, LONG LIVE LINUX MINT.
Instead of eliminating 32 bit support completely why not leave xfce 32 bit so that we can still use our computers and keep them security updated. We don’t want to junk all of our computers or have to look for a system that still supports 32 bit architecture, there are not many left to choose from.
I hope Ubuntu drama won’t affect mint.
But it will probably do.
Valve already said that they won’t support future versions of ubuntu.
There are also other distros like arch/debian/whatever that you can Mintify 🙂
You better start searching.
Mint already had a Debian version called LMDE and has for quite awhile now. No searching needed.
i know that.
But LMDE is based on Debian Testing.
I was refering to a more stable release
Hi Dan,
LMDE is based on Debian Stable.
Ubuntu already partially reverted and Valve has stated that it is sufficient a shift to expect to continue official support in Ubuntu 20.04. The difference is that they will make sure that they will extend their support to other distros as well.
We expect and trust that Linux Mint will make the right decision at the right time — e.g. making the main edition Debian-based (LMDE) — which might happen or not in the near future.
I supported Windows for 30+ years as a computer tech. The day I retired, I formatted my HD and installed Mint.
I never looked back. I love Mint and I want Mint to remain independent of outside interference. Corporations are interested in only one thing, MONEY. Not having to answer to anyone else and being able to determine your own course is what makes Linux and namely Mint such great operating systems. If Ubuntu and/or Mint go to the dark side (corporate america) I don’t know where I’ll turn to find a new operating system that is truly open source.
hi D.H.Rizzo
With this point:
“I love Mint and I want Mint to remain independent of outside interference. Corporations are interested in only one thing, MONEY. Not having to answer to anyone else and being able to determine your own course is what makes Linux and namely Mint such great operating systems. If Ubuntu and/or Mint go to the dark side (corporate america) I don’t know where I’ll turn to find a new operating system that is truly open source.”
you are completely right. But there is a choice: Trisquel or even Mageia. What about these ones??
But I really hope, that Mint will never ever be interfered by corporations and will stay independent. This is the only way how Mint will survive.
Greetings 😀
My biggest question is anyone working fixing samba for linux?
The one feature that Microsoft has going fo it is that it works out of the box … Linux not so much.
A great portion of that is the fact that even though samba is now the default network file sharing protocol for linux it does not work out of the box. Instead the user has to go hack the samba configuration file. Even then it likely to fail. I was recently working with an SQLite application (DB browser for SQLite). Works perfectly on Windows however on a Linux client it will not work DB files on a samba share.
linux samba == not ready for prime time
Yes, GNU/Linux isn’t ready for use in a company. Adding a computer in a domain, adding shared folders/printers and using them as a domain user are impossible.
True and sadly, Samba is still a pain to set up in Mint. And it’s not only about company use – I have a handful of old Windows machines at home, ranging from Win98SE to Win7, all connected to an 8-port switch, with one of them acting as a DHCP server, plus a networked printer (Lexmark E352dn). I expected Mint to “see” all of them seamlessly and connect to their shares (and the other way around). It took much web search and tinkering with configuration files before getting close to the desired result. I said close, not there. If it weren’t for Gigolo’s bookmarks I still couldn’t access 9x/XP shares from Mint.
On the other hand, a month or so ago I installed the then latest available version of MX Linux in Virtual Box on this Mint notebook. Not only it asked for Workgroup/domain name at install time (something only available through manual config file editing in Mint), but right after installation I went to Network and all running machines (including the Mint host) plus the printer were nicely listed and readily available. No tweaking whatsoever necessary.
I can only hope the Mint team will try and learn from MX Linux how to deal with networking in the most user-friendly way.
Appreciate the stance on snap/flat. I feel the same way, but even more. I think giant blobs that monolithic try to take over the entire OS (systemd) is also a problem. Would still love a Devuan based Mint. LMDV.
Here’s my last demo of Mint Mate:
https://youtu.be/ObtNu6Mv3lA
<3 Mint.
Guess this one has more views: https://youtu.be/9pA5POJ3MQs
Oh, and one other one: https://youtu.be/GkQneI7dZQ8
I think the idea of an LMDV would be outstanding, but not sure how hard it would be to implement. Since LMDE exists, maybe not too difficult. I’m wondering if someone might make such a fork-merge. I’d also be very interested if what effect that might have on DW hits.
I am getting excited about the Beta and 19.2 release.
I have only a few things I would like to beg for: 1 – PLEASE, please create a default file explorer (Nemo) icon size so that 100% is proportionally represented by the icon size we would like (currently I have to choose 66% but it also moves the view slider down rather than staiying in the middle. This would provide more flexibility for smecialized adjustments. 2 – Please be sure that the new release isn’t so CPU hungry. Currently, with 19.1 it always spinns up the fan compared to 17.3 where it only needs the fan when major graphics are involved.
Keep up your great work. I hope I can move my friends to 19.x soon.
I have a question, is Muffin going to be compatible with/available for MATE?
Currently using Compiz as my WM because of screen tearing, as Marco and Metacity fails on my AMD RX 540-based laptop running Tara 64-bit. Speaking of, is screen tearing still a thing on Linux Mint 19.2?
I’m excited for 19.2 mainly because of its new Window Manager (along with a redesign for the taskbar). I’ve got my hopes up high for this release.
just use Cinnamon it eliminates most of the issues.
i feel 19.2 should come as Cinnamon only (Official)- & MATE/XFCE as community builds . I would Love them Focus more on Cinnamon (either reduce a bit of ram usage or add UI/UX features sticking to the design philosophy for beginners coming from Windows world.)
Well, that’s a funny question. I never thought about it this way…
When I read your question, I thought “actually.. why not?” and I went ahead and tried. And yes, sure enough, you can run muffin 4.2 (I can’t remember if 4.0 works standalone) as the WM in MATE.
One word of caution though… when developers talk about “muffin”, they usually mean “cinnamon”, not muffin itself. On github, muffin is the WM project. On your computer, the binary running both the DE and the WM is cinnamon, and part of that binary is linked to the muffin library. In other words, what Cinnamon users run as a WM, is code coming from the muffin project, but which is part of the cinnamon binary at runtime, if that makes sense.
There is a standalone muffin package and binary (which aren’t used in Cinnamon). You can run that as a standalone WM, just like metacity, marco of xfwm4. We use it sometimes to troubleshoot issues, to know if an issue is part of the actual muffin project, or part of Cinnamon. The WM you get in muffin is simpler than the one you get in Cinnamon.. they share the same muffin code, but the cinnamon one also has cinnamon code (sorry.. it’s hard to explain simply in layman terms).
Anyway, if you want to give it a try in MATE, open a terminal and type “muffin –replace”. You can also configure it via gsettings, “gsettings list-recursively org.cinnamon.muffin”.
Note: muffin (i.e. the standalone window-manager) isn’t used by anyone and it’s not something we really maintain/support. We only use it internally to troubleshoot cinnamon now and then.
I had the same problem with MATE screen tearing, and my Lenovo X140e laptop also had AMD CPU and graphics. Compiz WM reduced the problem, but didn’t eliminate it. My laptop got too hot with LM 17.x Cinnamon, so I used MATE. But it stayed cool with LM 18.x Cinnamon, with no screen tearing, so I gave up on MATE and switched back to Cinnamon. Maybe Muffin as MATE WM would have been another solution.
I guess what Clem meant by his statement is that Muffin is supposed to be fully-functional within Cinnamon DE, not MATE, which goes without saying BTW. Even so, I went ahead and installed the version available on the store. Good thing: It performs reasonably well, animations are very decent (well, compared to Compiz’s poor performance I guess anything is better than this) but that’s about it. My taskbar is on the bottom, but when minimizing a window, the animation refers to the side, as if I had my taskbar on the left. On top of that, it completely ignores my Appearance preferences for the window border (which I guess it could be worked around by installing ObConf) but I couldn’t proceed with it because it performed the minimize animation once and then just died. Next time I tried it, whenever I hit that minimize button, it just dies and now my windows are borderless. So now I’m back using Compiz which is stuck forever in 0.9.1. But there’s a reason to love Linux Mint. See, it’s based on Ubuntu 18.04 (the same version that freezes every so often during normal use and keeps complaining about voltage drop for my AMD video card) but the BIG DIFFERENCE is that Linux Mint does it right: Unlike Ubuntu, I have NOT experienced a single issue based on my video card since 18.3. However, because I’m using a laptop, performance governors kick in when the machine’s on battery, and I can’t get the best out of it (ie gaming) unless I have it plugged in. Which sucks, and might never be fixed in the future, but despite that, I love the file manager and the fact I can feel myself at home just like I did on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin. It’s just a shame my window manager sucks with its poorly-performed animations and I can’t see another option to it, even considering Linux Mint 19.2 (after all, it seems like Muffin will remain exclusive to Cinnamon because as I said before the version in the repo is very buggy and the github one has some kind of dependency I can’t satisfy). Thing is, my work on this machine relies entirely on vino, it has to sit on v3.8.1 and because of that I’m dependent on MATE and Gnome, which prevents me from using another DE, as it is a PITA to run Gnome applications (especially the ones that rely on dconf definitions) on other DEs.
Please the new bugs when you fresh installs . Middle of upgrade system crashes 64 bits 19.1
Hello, Clem it’s cool to hear from you 🙂
Debian 10 Buster is coming out tomorrow… Raspbian is already in version 10 for a few days. I hope that LMDE4 will arrive soon. I’m too impatient 🙂 Tomorrow, I will stop using Mint 19.x on my mobile to test Debian 10 on it until you publish LMDE4.
The new Mint Box v3 is great but far too expensive… It is much more profitable to assemble myself my workstations. I am more sensitive to machines like the Mint Box v2, but it is too expensive too …
I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 which is really nice with 4 Gb of RAM, it’s more a machine like this that will interest me with the Mint Box RPi appellation 🙂 The CPU should have been engraved in 0.14 microns because it heats too much but … but at that price it still makes me service.
RPi does not have a stable 64-bit ARM Debian distribution, I will be you I will propose a LMDE4 for RPi in urgency before others do it, as well as a collaborative partnership with the RPi Foundation.
OS only offered in 64 bits is good, you should have done it much sooner ! All this work for compile, test and maintain a distribution 32 bits while most people who use it have PCs with 64-bit CPUs, is a heresy…
Compatibility and support of 32-bit applications must be maintained, even within 20 years, or more… we will always need it !!
It’s a great idea to get promoted Mint through bloggers or youtube channels with a lot of subscribers, communication is “one of the nerve of the war” as it says in French 🙂
I wish you the best, I will have always good thoughts for you and your work (and that of your team of course !). You have given me happiness with your distributions 🙂 Excellent continuation to you and excuse my for my bad english.
Philippe
Notes :
Tomorrow, I will stop using Mint 19.x on my laptop, not on my mobile (google translate error) to test Debian 10 on it until you publish LMDE4.
It would be nice in the future for the new versions of LMDE to be released exactly at the same time as the new versions of Debian and not 3 to 6 months later as it is now. The current system creates a big habdicap for the adoption of your distribution because it is published too late. I think this is not a problem for people from Debian, RPi people have published Buster even before Debian 🙂
linuxmint 18.2 remains the best, very stable, I am very thankful to the linuxmint team … it is amazing and my update is running perfectly
* Wine ready for gaming
* Crossover ready for gaming
* Update New Kernel 5.0.0-15 Generic
* low / high hardware support
Your hard work is truly amazing, I am very grateful for the linuxmint team
Here is another User that would appreciate a bigger focus on LMDE.
Hello.
Will the future version of Xfce be implemented in the Linux Mint?
Hello, Clem:
A big thank you for the quick and informative response, regarding the MESA/Xfce window manager breakage. Once again, this shows the power and importance of Timeshift; thank you for your work and implementation of this great piece of software. Thank you, too, for the information on the MintUpdate levels. I still use them for reference/information use only; however, given the large commitment it sounds like it takes to keep them, I certainly understand the decision to discontinue them. Likewise, I appreciate the “heads up,” regarding the upcoming discontinuation of them, verses having it be a surprise.
Again, thank you for your continued support of your fellow Linux Minters. 🙂
Love Cinnamon; using on my Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro. Snappy is right and with WPS Office update, this is as smooth as butter. Great work guys, and warrants another donation.
I have Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa Cinnamon installed and I use it as my Main OS every day. There is no better Operating system to be had.
Clem, I would like see Nemo adopt the extra pane selection button into the toolbar as one of the selectable visible buttons under File Management preferences. Similar to KDE Dolphin. Extra pane is such a useful tool and it would be much easier and quicker to select or deselect from the toolbar.
Guys, Mint with Budgie desktop looks and works amazing!
I am completely against snaps being used as a forced method to distribute packages. Canonical’s decisions have been quite controversial both lately and in the recent past. I haven’t been one calling for the switch to a Debian base but if they keep putting the Mint team in compromised positions it may need closer examination. Personally, I don’t want snaps on my system at all and would like to continue to use the robust and well proven APT for package management. I have no idea what benefit moving just Chromium over to a snap package is.
From an Ubuntu website:
” the transition from deb to snap is not being debated, it’s a firm plan that will eventually save a lot of engineering, builder and maintenance resources by removing the need to build every new version of chromium on all supported Ubuntu releases.”
https://community.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-testing-chromium-browser-deb-to-snap-transition/11179/6
This is not in support of the decision, just information.
that is unfortunate. It appears that Ubuntu is scaling back their development and maintenance efforts.
Lately I’ve alternated between using 19, 19.1, and LMDE3. I’m using LMDE3 now, and it’s just great. Can’t tell the difference functionally, and LMDE is noticeably faster.
After deciding I wanted the latest version of LibreOffice, I uninstalled the LMDE version and installed 6.2.5.2 from the LO site. It was fast and easy to do. and it works fine.
Whether to continue with the Ubuntu base is purely the Mint team’s call. But if LMDE were to become the only version of Mint available, it wouldn’t bother me. In any case, I’ll continue using LMDE.
Whats going on with Mate Advanced Menu?
Keeping or removing it?
Redesign?
A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a deal breaker for most people I assume. Also VERY glad you will include 32 bit libraries. I just have to have ia32lib 😉
Thanks Clem and Co.
a query linuxmint lmde will have support for 32 bits after 2020 onwards or will it also be deleted? is i have two pc of 32 plus this why to switch to the other version thanks
Why doesn’t the terminal go full screen by default?
Sometime after 19.2 comes out, I’d appreciate a release with a backup tool for Cinamon system settings *only*. This is perhaps one of the functions of the “Mint backup tool,” but I can’t find any information about that, and I’m not interested in a tool to back up all my data or my applications and their configuration. Just my Cinnamon settings.
For example, whenever I do a data backup (a simple copy to a thumb drive), I first use the backup function of firefox to save my bookmarks to a folder I created within my Documents folder. After I (re)install the OS, I copy in my Documents folder and then use firefox’s restore function, pointing it to the appropriate file. This is easy to do and understand, realiable, and fast. It saves me an enormous amount of time and frustration.
Since I change most of the keystrokes for standard Cinnamon shorcuts, as well as create a lot of custom shortcuts, just being able to backup and restore my Cinnamon keyboard shortcuts would be a big help. It would also be nice to be able to do this with all the appearance settings, as well as many others.
I know that when you implement new functionality, the old settings scheme may not apply. In those cases, it would be fine with me if the restore function didn’t even try to restore the affected settings, perhaps providing an informative message to that effect.
Similarly, I’m not interested in having this settings backup tool restore my application software and its configuration. I figure that’s my responsibility or, as in the case of firefox, the application’s responsibility.
Nothing fancy or super-smart. Just easy to understand, easy to do, reliable, and confined to Cinnamon settings.
In any case, thanks very much for the great software you folks provide.
By the way, I’m talking about backing up to a user-designated file, and restoring from a user-designated file. Easier to develop, I’d think, than fancier, more automated alternatives.
Easy peasy – just create a folder somewhere, inside it create a file, name settings-dump, inside it paste dconf dump / > dconf-settings . Save it it and make it executable, make another settings-load, and and past in dconf load / < dconf-settings . Save it it and make executable. All yo do then is double click and run to save and and the same on the other to load (log off might make the load cleaner)
@minter – sorry about the typos and spelling. One click restores all settings stored in dconf, it can be specified for nemo or cinnamon with the right options (cant remember off the top of my head)
@ Clem and Minter, in regards to Minter’s post, seeing as Linux Mint now supports and collaborates with Tony George’s Timeshift project which is now installed by default in Linux Mint, how about the same support and inclusion of his Aptik and Aptik-GTK project to back up system settings, PPAs, etc? I use Aptik on a regular basis and it’s such a timesaver, and seems to work flawlessly (for me anyway). I’d really love to see it included in Linux Mint by default. Please could the Mint Dev team at least take a look at the project, and maybe even discuss the possibility of inclusion with Tony George himself as you did with Timeshift. Thanks in advance.
Wayne O and Lord Mozart, thanks for your thoughts about this. (I’ll give dconf a try.)
@Minter, Below are the contents of the little toy I use, much of it is useless extras, but im experimening. Yad is needed but i believe Mint has it anyway. Make the tweaks you need because my coding is garbage ( Clearly )
Here is the restore
#!/bin/bash
GTK_THEME=”” yad –window-icon=/usr/local/binw/w-action-files/w-icon.png –title=”Logoff To Restore Your Saved Settings” –buttons-layout=center –fixed –sticky –on-top –button=”Restore Your Last Save ?” –button=”‘ NO ‘ I Don’t Want To” –center
ret=$?
if [ $ret -eq 0 ]; then
cd ~/.config/w-custom
dconf load /org/cinnamon/ < saved-dconf-tp1
dconf load /org/nemo/ /dev/null 2>&1
sleep 0.5
cinnamon-session-quit –logout –force
fi
And here is the save
#!/bin/bash
GTK_THEME=”” yad –window-icon=/usr/local/binw/w-action-files/w-icon.png –title=”Save Your Current Settings” –buttons-layout=center –fixed –sticky –on-top –button=”Overwrite Your Last Save ?” –button=”‘ NO ‘ I Don’t Want To” –center
ret=$?
if [ $ret -eq 0 ]; then
cd ~/.config/w-custom
dconf dump /org/cinnamon/ > saved-dconf-tp1
dconf dump /org/nemo/ > saved-dconf-tp2
fi
Its portable and works anywhere.
Hope it helps
Forgot to add, just double click and choose run (not in terminal).
I will shut up now 😉
The save script has been tweaked to make you directory. Sorry for repeating and i will definitely stop now.
#!/bin/bash
GTK_THEME=”” yad –window-icon=/usr/local/binw/w-action-files/w-icon.png –title=”Save Your Current Settings” –buttons-layout=center –fixed –sticky –on-top –button=”Overwrite Your Last Save ?” –button=”‘ NO ‘ I Don’t Want To” –center
ret=$?
if [ $ret -eq 0 ]; then
mkdir ~/.config/w-custom >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 0.5
cd ~/.config/w-custom
dconf dump /org/cinnamon/ > saved-dconf-tp1
dconf dump /org/nemo/ > saved-dconf-tp2
fi
Just a thought on this thread that I’d like to point out a few things to prevent any misconceptions.
Its much more than what is in the dconf file to restoring a custom menu setup.
Mint Menu itself: ~/.config/menus/cinnamon-applications.menu
Applications edited in the Mint Menu: ~/.local/share/applications/
Panel-launcher: ~/.cinnamon/configs/panel-launchers@cinnamon.org/*.json
Custom date format: ~/.cinnamon/configs/calendar@cinnamon.org/*.json
Start Menu Height and other settings: ~/.cinnamon/configs/menu@cinnamon.org/*.json
Whether your system uses the modern or traditional layout: ~/.cinnamon/configs/grouped-window-list@cinnamon.org/*.json
What is in your auto start: ~/.config/autostart/
Your default program-file associations: ~/.config/mimeapps.list
Your Nemo bookmarks: ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks
What I do is save the entire dconf file and then remove everything but I want to start a base system with, creating a ‘template’ to load on all the systems. Dconf file determines the order in which apps are displayed in the notification area, icons, themes, Nemo preferences, wallpaper, X-Apps setting and quite a few other things.
Also, if copied over correctly, it is not necessary to logout of or restart the Cinnamon process.
Thanks for the discussion; I’ve appreciated it and will try some of the suggestions.
Right now, I’m thinking of two of my favorite Mint tools: USB Image Writer, and USB Stick Formatter. The work these two little utilities do could easily be done by other programs if one selects the right options. But it’s nice not to have to remember the options. The Image Writer and Stick Formatter do very specific, very limited tasks very well. They’re great. I was thinking of something like that for a utility to save and restore Cinnamon Settings.
BTW, if the Mint people discover a better way to implement these simple usb functions, the details will be blessedly invisible to us users. Same could be true for a settings-backup utility.
@Harry W. Haines III, I have a backup script for that too, was not clear though what Minter wanted until now (Im not the sharpest pin). Hopefully it was some use.
Yes, here is part of that script. dconf file also saves most settings in System Settings, like effects, fonts, window behavior, privacy settings, etc. The command “dconf watch /” will let you watch in real time what you are changing.
https://pastebin.com/uNgpAe5v
Hello, Im a new user of Mint, I want to learn more about this OS Im coming of W10 and is a lot to understand, any YT channel or something to learn more ?
Probably forcing Snap is an attempt to build the environment for distributing commercial software. The lack of popular commercial software is one of the main reasons why Linux is still so unpopular. I doubt Snap will ever substitute *.deb but it may bring changes to Linux world. For the better or for the worse, no one knows before.
Hi Clem and to the Linux Mint Team,
why Linux Mint don’t offer a Gnome edition ? Linux Mint have Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce edition only. Do you plan to give a Gnome Edition for Linux Mint in the future or it will never happens ?
Thanks.
Though I haven’t tried, it must be easy to install on Mint XFCE especially, then remove XFCE if desired…
MATE is better and as light as XFCE. Why keeping XFCE ? A 32 bit version of Linux Mint with Openbox/LXDE like https://sparkylinux.org/about/ or https://www.bunsenlabs.org is enough for old computers. The Ubuntu version of Linux Mint should be abandonned too and only Deban based versions should be develop. It would be easiest to write a bug report (I never know where to put them : in Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MATE… bug trackers ?).
Though I haven’t tried, it must be easy to install on Mint XFCE especially, then remove XFCE if desired…
This was in reply to Dupo but appeared as a new post..
Thank you for all your hardwork! I was sad when I read about the May Monthly News. I’ve been using Linux Mint since Felicia. I tried almost all major desktop linux but I’ve always loved Mint. There are distros that may be faster, there are distros that may be more beautiful, or there are other distros that may be more stable, but no other distro that is well balanced between stability, speed and beauty!
Everytime I try other distro I always go back to Linux Mint. There is something about Linux Mint that I always miss. It’s probably nostalgia. I’ve been using it since the early days.
I wish the LInux Mint team more luck and success. Thank you!
“From Freedom Came Elegance”
This is the first time l have heard about problems with Ubuntu regarding snap, so l may be wide of the mark.
Ubuntu is in self down stream from Debian, and major components like KDE and Gnome and l expect countless other important bits. Perhaps you could remind them that there own distro may well end up with many mentions of Gnome KDE and Debian if they started following their lead on branding snap packages etc.
32 bit to 64 bit looks like a nightmare… Most of the things that most of us do with our computers are possible to do with our old 32 bit PCs, and there should be at least two major concerns: A) the environmental problem of having we as consumers doing the “throw all that old stuff to the garbage, just because it is old” thing. B) new is not better, new is just new; what are we winning in the substitution of a 32 bits computer that works perfectly for another that is just a new 64 bits PC, and has the same old flaws or even worse (for instance, you could be changing your old computer without intel AMT, for a newly branded Intel-all-spying-peace-of-garbage-NSA-CERTIFIED :-).
No Gnome edition please. It has its own unsolvable issues!
Read all the comments to date, so far. Many seem confused about the differences between LM & LMDE. Debian based, without the Ubuntu foundations means no PPA system. Some may be cautious about the security issues introduced by PPA, but I’ll risk that.
If we are offered the three additional options of snap, flatpak & appimage, we still have the full range of Debian repositories. These Debian repositories are good enough to solve most (all?) incompatibilities, via Synaptic Package Manager. Another fifth & sixth installation option is still open to us, via CLI or by scripts.
On the Chromium issue, we still have very many Chromium-based web browsers. In Linux these include (alphabetical order): Brave, Chromium, Eloston, Iron, Maxthon, Opera, Otter, Slimjet, Superbird, Uc & Vivaldi. My favorite is Slimjet, which automatically remembers the user-name configurations, regardless of the operating system (Linux or Windows), regardless of the hardware. Generally the “good” Chromium-based web browsers inherit the configuration stored with the user-name, easily & automatically. On this definition then both Opera & Vivaldi are not “good”.
With the Ubuntu PPA system, updates to applications can be detected & updated fairly easily. The user’s Desktop Environment (DE), complete with customizations, will also be followed in the application. If we use the application containers including snap, flatpak & appimage, these DE settings will not be included in the application.
Oops. Forgot the SEVENTH way to add applications: “Software Manager”, as it is called in the XFCE of Mint. This is the Mint user-friendly version of Synaptic Package Manager. It offers a friendly screen layout, with descriptions & reviews of the applications. In many other Linux distros it is often given the name similar to “Discover”.
The only reason I ever came to Linux and Linux Mint was because it is open source, community based and importantly open minded. Any attempt to lock down to particular suppliers and systems troubles me. Haven’t researched snap enough to know but it does seem inclusive.
It’s a great distro but Canonical seem to be getting aligned to big brother tactics. I’d entertain the LMDE sooner rather than later if this is the case.
Dear Clem and Team
The ongoing improvements planned are excellent and will make an excellent distribution even better. The Cinnamon, scrollbar and nemo “upgrades” are great, and it is wonderful how responsive the team are to suggestions from the users. A big THANK YOU to all
Regarding Snaps, it is a concern and I am glad Clem will be “on the panel”. As @Daniel said, if a program installs something else it is behaving like a virus. or at the very least “potentially unwanted software”. Regarding the example of spotify where you asks “if spotify stops caring what do we do?” I would suggest that has always been a potential issue, if an editor stops supplying a package then that can very well be the end of it so it is essential suppliers are on board here too. That said, I do not like the idea of Canonical (or anyone else) becoming a “sole supplier” for obvious reasons. Hopefully the “open ethos” of Linux will prevail
Hi Clem
Would it be possible for the update manager to update installed applets? Or can something notify one that the applet is out of date? I was about to report a bug on an applet, but when I went to applets, download, refreshed and looked for the applet there was an “update” option. I updated and the bug had been fixed in the updated version. I then went through all my installed applets in the download area and 3/4 had updates available that I knew nothing about
I think this applet will do for what you’re looking for:
https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/309
Thanks Lord Mozart
Just what i wanted, i had no idea this existed
Your help is much appreciated!!
best wishes
There will always be special place in my hearth for Mint, because it was my first Linux experience.
But, I don’t like corporate pressure (Fedora, Cannonical…) I only really like LMDE. I left Mint for MX. I will start using Mint again (as dual boot, as second distro, MX is now my true love) when LMDE become Mint primary focus. As long as Mint stays based on Ubuntu, I will stay away.
That being said, thank you Mint for all you have done, you made switching from windows to Linux much easier!
After all the affairs I’ve had with the Linux Mint mistresses since Mistress Isadora (Linux Mint 9) I must say of them all, Tina is taking the longest to cum …erm, sorry I mean “come.” 😉
@ Clem, just a bit of light trivia for you when you take a few mins out of your busy schedule; Can you, WITHOUT looking, name all of the Linux Mint releases by their codenames? 🙂
P.S. Feel free to delete my first paragraph if you deem it inappropriate for this blog page. 🙂
Hi Clem,
Interesting pieces of information on changes in nemo, Cinnamon menu etc. – but quite vague. When will they be offered? Within a couple of days? Or are they part of 19.2?
Been saying since last summer that Ubuntu is not interested in investing anymore in the desktop. Writing is on the wall.
No solution will be easy, but best to just rip off the bandage. Base Mint 20 on Debian Stable with backports. Debian 10 Buster is an awesome release. If you want updated Cinnamon and other apps use Debian Testing or Sid with all the accompanying warnings as a 2nd, ‘testing version’. But keep a Debian Stable release with stable packages for Main Mint. Last time I’ll suggest it because I think you are almost too late to the party already. Users are moving on and will continue to do so until a real Mint Blueprint is in place. Wish you all the best. Much appreciate the good work you have done for so many years. Thanks.
Just to add to the kbd47 comment above: I’m using Debian 10 Cinnamon from June 2017 on several machines – from the 1st day of the Buster testing period (there are always live Cinnamon images and unofficial non-free Cinnamon images including firmware available on debian.org). Till now it was stable and smooth experience on various hardware. Please note that you will get newer software than with LMDE but miss several Linux Mint Main Edition trademark features: update center, kernel manager, driver manager, software center and welcome center. For that reason I keep those systems for personal use only. And I suppose it is unrealistic to expect that kernel manager and driver manager from main edition will be incorporated in LMDE at some point. So I hope that the Ubuntu-based LM Cinnamon will persist beyond April 2023.
Nice to read about all development! Personally, I highlight the work with reduced RAM resource need. I currently have Cinnamon on a low-spec-computer. But xfce is much less resource-needing, so I may well change to xfce. But then it might be possible to switch to Cinnamon again, if its becoming less hungry.
Also thanks for the chapter about the concerns with Snap, I was not aware of it.
Dear , Linux Mint community,
I have been an error few minutes ago when my pc was in stand by . I am using Linux Mint 19.1 Xfce.
The trouble is regarding ” Xfce4 -power-manager- 1000. service. Can I paste the debug code here ?
It’s a pc Intel Core duo year 2008 with 4GB Ram
Please help me to solve this bug. Thanks
Bye
why don’t you came back to KDE solution … i loving KDE please i think it’s a better choice for desktop
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3766#comment-149846
Though I click on the Reply button, it appears as a new post. Second time. Interesting..
i move to kde neon now … it’s great … but my heart will still always with mint
hey people,
Ubuntu and other derivatives and many other Linux-Distors will come into a big problem soon with these new Ryzen-3000-CPUs. An error inside systemd causes the failure. Look here:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-3K-RdRand-Systemd-Maybe
or even here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1835809
This should also be adressed in LinuxMint.
Greetings
mint not use wayland
Phoronix is brilliant (I think maybe he is)
His articles are typically headline rich, and content poor… but a good place to start some true research (I suppose)
I believe that what he is ranting about is actually “old news” and no longer significant
Also reddit already posted about that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/calk3p/the_ryzen_3000_boot_problem_with_newer_linux/
This should be adressed.
Greetings
Here also a german article about this issue:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ryzen-3000-Bekannter-Fehler-bringt-viele-Linux-Distributionen-zu-Fall-4465220.html
This effects all distros.
I have a lot of “old stuff” that I like and it works well and is paid for. I don’t buy a new car, toaster or washing machine just because the newer ones have improvements in their new firmware. That being said, there is nothing inherently broken or flawed with 32-bit software. Some 32-bit software could be 10-15-20 years old and the vendor is no longer in business, however, the paid-for software works perfectly as it was intended to and still works perfectly in production. The old stuff can co-exist with the new stuff and there is no reason to force people to find replacements for perfectly good 32-bit software just to make it 64-bit. Luckily we live in a world where you can have virtual machines and keep the older operating systems and software running on newer hardware.
Looks like some awesome progress coming up. I for one am looking forward to a Buster based LMDE. I’m loving Buster but missing the newer version of Cinnamon and the Update and Software managers that come with LMDE.
I believe that the Mint Nation, should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of migrating to Debian, and leaving Ubuntu. No single project will be as impressive to Linuxkind, or more important to the survival of Free Software principles., and none may be so inexpensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of LMDE and Cinnamon. We propose explorations into other desktops, such as MATE, Trinity, and others, to ensure the over-riding goal which the Nations will never overlook: that of Linux and Mint’s continued survival. But in a real sense, it will not be one distro–if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be the entire Nation. For all of us must work to put Mint there.
Yes, the speech mirror’s President Kennedy’s speech to Congress seeking a commitment to go to the Moon. It is time to acknowledge that Mint and Linuxkind stand at a crossroads, and the time for decision has come: do we dare to accept the challenge of setting own own goals, our own course, and seeking our own rewards?
Firstly, many thanks for picking up the Ctrl W and Ctrl Q wrinkles in the xapps, that’s one of those little irritations that makes a big difference for those using keyboard shortcuts regularly.
In terms of LMDE, which I have tried out in the past and really liked, would there be sufficient bandwidth in the development team to consider an XFCE variant of LMDE; with all the free time you now have as a result of dropping the KDE flavor of LM (only joking, I know you are super busy all the time!). Seriously, is XFCE sufficiently common to make a LMDE version an easy re-spin?
Since LMDE’s goal is to keep an open avenue in case Mint suddenly can’t relly on Ubuntu anymore, adding more DE’s seems a bit pointless…
Now, if the Mint Team somehow manages to get all the goodies from Ubuntu and easily implement it on top of Debian, they can then deduplicate a lot of work and free resources for other projects…
That’s what i hope for.
…the addition of a XFCE variant would broaden the appeal of LMDE, hopefully increase the take up of the distro, and thereby make it a more viable alternative should Ubuntu ever disappear, or at least be a stronger negotiating position if Canonical get too focussed on say Snaps for example.
Thanks for the continuous innovations introduced to all the Mint team, you are great! I would like to tell that at least from 18.x, and now in 19.x in all italian Mint DEs (Cinnamon, Mate etc.), in the password entry window for system updates, the request is made in english, not in italian. The string is: “Authentication is required to run the Synaptic Package Manager”. Is this also the case in all other non-english versions? Is it possible to finally translate this part too? Thanks to you, slowly, I’m really saying goodbye to other OS.
I like too LMDE, but as far as I noticed the Ubuntu gets newer NVidia drivers compare to Debian.
Last time when I tryied LMDE, it misses some functionalty like (Kernel Update, Driver Manager)
Would it be possible to add/show in LM more/all ubuntu Kernel versions in Kernel Update manager?
MintBox3. Portable? Taking my monitor keyboard and mouse with me? All that for thousand of dollars? For that amount of money I can build luxurious desktop. What am I missing? Why anybody (if) will buy this device? Just my two cents.
Portability is nice but it’s not the main idea behind it. Sure, it’s small and somewhat portable, sure there’s no moving parts so transport won’t affect it durability… the main idea here though is passive cooling and form factor. There’s nothing else like this. It looks amazing, it’s silent, it’s small and cute, and it’s fast. If all you care about is what’s inside, get something big, ugly, noisy and made of plastic and it will be cheaper.
As a distribution, we’re not interested in partnering with budget manufacturers. We don’t really make money on computers. We do this because it’s special. If you could find that anywhere else or make your own off cheap ebay components, we’d have no reason to be interested in it. You can install Mint on any computer and find Mint badges and stickers in many places on the Internet. These boxes are special, we love them and we’re thrilled to partner with Compulab on them.
Clem, so because is small and cute, somebody really will buy this thing? For thousands of dollars? Without any practical reason? LOL…..I still do not get it.
Clem, my desktop machine is not so big, it is quiet with “touch” buttons (not mechanical) , with temperature display, very fast and powerful. On top of that, I can open it, replace motherboard, CPU, PSU, Memory, add (as many as I want) HARD DRIVES….and all of that just for $ fragment of this small and cute box for thousands of dollars. Can this “small and cute” box do the same for you? I’m practical, common sense person and these are my arguments. No hard feeling, just my toughs. Than your and LM team for all that hard work. LM is THE BEST OS in the world!
Clem, why is the terminal transparent by default? Why would anyone want to see the desktop background thru the terminal, which makes it hard to see what we are typing. I know how to correct it ,just asking why you have it set to transparent.
Hi Clanten,
There are two reasons. It looks neat (although that’s very subjective and thus arguable), and it allows you to keep an eye on background operations when running commands (although most people don’t need that). We darkened the default opacity in the upcoming release. It was set to 90% previously, it’s now set to 97%.
Hi Clem and Clanten
Darkening the opacity to 97 % is a step in the right direction.
However, I have done like Clanten, unchecked transparent background.
When working in the terminal I like it to be fully focused on that, and don’t want to see the desktop in the background. I think unchecked background in the terminal should be the default setting.
Also, there is a an option do check limit scrollback. I don’t know what is the default setting here (though it is possible to check by running the LMDE 3 live system), but I definately prefer to have the scrollback box unchecked so that you can scroll back to see what is going on in the terminal as much as your heart’s desire :-).
I remember that unchecking the scrollback box was recommended when upgrading from LMDE 2 to LMDE 3.
I think the default setting here for the future should be unchecked box for scrollback.
Also thanks for the upcoming upgrades in Nemo 4.2, Conditional actions and Cinnamon improvements where two installed apps with the same name would appear together instead of as two separate entries.
Not sure about you, but I expect LMDE 4 to be released sometime during the first half of 2020. 🙂
Reading the release notes for Debian 10 Buster, I think there are some serious bugs that you need to make sure is fixed before releasing LMDE 4.
1: Using Gnome-Disk-Utility to change the LUKS encryption passphrase, deletes the old passphrase, but also makes the new one you set, inacessible, so you will lose access to your disk, forever.
2: Calamares installer leaves disk encryption keys readable
Point two would only be relevant for users who do a clean install, and only if they use Calamares to install your system.
Keep up the good work! 🙂
I’m puzzled how moving chromium into a snap format saves developer time. Wouldn’t the snap have to be updated for every Chromium change (especially security related)?
Perhaps a Mint ‘plan B’ would be to host the ungoogled-chromium package in the Mint repositories. Of course this could be a slippery slope since Mint infrastructure would have to compile it and its dependencies.
I haven’t followed how fast the Debian project updates chromium in their testing or sid repos, so getting it from there might not be a stable solution.
Aha!!! (posting here is faster than trying to register for bugreporting, etc). I think I may have a clue for the random system freezes and IO hangups which some people have experienced. Caught “gvfsd-afp” gabbing 100% of one core and not letting go. It was a s imple drag-n-drop copy of one file, but across file systems. Cancelling the copy in the UI had no effect whatsoever. Gnome virtual file system daemon – IO abstraction layer. Upstream code, not Mint.
IMHO, Snaps, Flatpak, AppImage, they are all flawed and need to die.
The only good way to manage packages on a linux system is with ONE package manager that manages the entire dependency tree for the install. That way I can trust that my distribution and its repositories get updated, have security patches applied, and implemented across everything on my system.
With Snaps/Flatpak/AppImage you wind up with every goddamned little software project bundling up their own junk dependencies which may or may not be fully patched. That, and it is extremely inefficient to have dependencies duplicated throughout the system. Snaps, Flatpak, AppImage and the like are a cancer and need to die.
Long live the ONE central package manager. Long live dpkg/Apt.
You do have a point that it is inefficient to have duplications and I agree with the potential security aspect. However, as I understand it, it will get round the problem of things stopping working when the underlying release changes and that could solve a lot of issues
Matt: chill out!
I respect your opinion, but there are many other valid opinions on how to manage packages and repositories.
Snaps, Flatpak, AppImage … I have no use for them.
the rub is that some folks need them to work around the shortcomings of the distro (distro-glue), and the distro that Mint is built on.
What I Do Not Like About Snaps
1 They Wrap Themselves Around System D Slowing Down The Boot
2 The More Of Them You Install the slower your boot becomes
I Don’t Know About you But I Like A Small Boot A Small Boot Is A much faster boot
My Advice To Clem And Team Please Try To Keep The Boot As Small As Possible
there are so many things that do not need to be running all the time.
Now For What I Like About Snaps
1 there are programs and games you can get for them that no other package manager provides such as ways to install tricky games like Command And Conquer Yuri’s Revenge no other package manager has that
2 you can get some windows only software through them
3 And New Snaps Are Added to the store on a regular basis
I Tried Snap and like it allot but dropped it because of all the entries in the boot because of it and the programs i installed
I Like To Keep My Boot As Small As I Can Get it
One Concern Older Systems having no choice but to run snap would suffer greatly from the added extra processes I Do Think That Is A Valid Concern
Another Concern is That Big Tech Like Microsoft And Google and Apple Have Way To Much Power I Fear That They Wish To Corner The Market and lock people into there system and take away there freedom of choice forcing them to run what Big Tech Wants them to run and not something that works like Mint Big Tech Mainly Microsoft Hate Operating systems that work
If Everyone Ran Linux It Would Put Computer Repair Guys Out Of Business Please Click On The Link To This Article On Delightly Linux Perform Computer Repair? Linux Could Put You Out of Business https://delightlylinux.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/perform-computer-repair-linux-could-put-you-out-of-business/#more-5016
You Will Understand What I,am Talking about after reading that article
Hope This Helps Somebody
Linux Mint Rocks
Been using Mint for years (best distro for a long time); however, lately I have been wanting to move as far away as possible from the Ubuntu base. When Debian released Buster I knew it was time to make the leap to their non-free Cinnamon spin. I would have moved to LMDE instead but it is lagging behind Buster (PLEASE update LMDE with a ver 4 release to include all the Buster goodness). In the meantime I’m running this:
https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/10.0.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-cinnamon+nonfree.iso
One Opinion i would also like to include I See Nothing wrong with Flatpak so the programs are bigger in size but at least they do not add themselves to the boot like snap does
and they do not interfere with system dependencies which is fine by me no worry of breaking anything and with today’s hard drives are getting bigger in capacity and cheaper in price
anything from 250 GB or up disk space is not an issue for most people
even with Flatpak I Like Flatpak i also have tried every edition of mint and like them all
I Hope Linux Mint 20 turns out to be just as good as 19.1 19.1 is the best most stable release i have seen to date Outstanding Job Clem And Team you are truly exceptional
when finally we can use 19.2 ?
Follow the news in the Community
https://community.linuxmint.com/iso
The community page indicates that Beta test is more or less done. https://community.linuxmint.com/iso
So Beta version is out soon i guess…
(Big Thanx to Clem and Team. We love what you do.. )
NEVER, J/K
Takes time to put together and test then fix then test again it’s not an exact science. An old man once told me
“Perfection take time, and humans are too impatient to wait…”
Now!!!
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/linuxmint/iso/testing/
http://mirrors.evowise.com/linuxmint/testing/
In my mind I have a lot to say here but it would be too long and convoluted (and maybe not very politically correct either) so I’ll skip the theory. Thing is, many (most?) people consider thanks as being implied and only speak about the shortcomings/issues, which could make someone – the team, in our case – think they’re doing a bad job. Nope, it’s not like that – you’re doing a great job but people hardly express that unless they’re somehow driven to. So guys, don’t be discouraged by negative feedback. 😉
Now, from my point of view as a longtime Win9x user (mostly 98SE) with Revolutions Pack installed ever since it was called LameSkin, an operating system should look appealing and confortable to the user, especially for those who spend almost (or more than) a third of a day’s time in front of the screen. This means visual customization capabilities to the max, in a very friendly way. Do not copy the Win10 abomination with those ugly, huge and clunky switches when discrete checkboxes existed since forever; those sketchy at best monochrome icons are horrible and many times confusing – why does the display have millions of colors capability? And so on and so forth.
What I’m trying to say is: don’t copy the worst from M$ – try to copy the best, if possible.
Looks aside, most if not all options and functions should be available in GUI, both for Windows converts and new computer users. If anything, well designed GUIs would ensure the correct parameters are being sent to underlying application(s) or terminal, as opposed to having to research complicated command line commands online (assuming the system can go online at the time) and the risk of typing the wrong case in a parameter with possibly bad results.
As for me personally, first thing I’d like to have as a file manager is something as close as possible to Total Commander (with a handful of well chosen plug-ins). I haven’t used Explorer on my Win machines since the year 2000 if not earlier. Closest I found was Krusader but it’s still far from what I need. Now, if Nemo remembered the open tabs between sessions, that would be a good start. Custom actions (and possibly plug-ins) would get it closer. Since one may store and use Win applications through Wine (or similar), an option/column to sort by file extension would be great – sorting by file type just doesn’t cut it.
Networking is a sour spot in Mint, I’ve mentioned it somewhere above (if my previous comments got through). Home users may have small networks, I do, and it’s a pain to set it up correctly, including manual editing of files – always error-prone. MX Linux does a great job, hopefully it can be learned from.
I’ll stop for now, although a few other important subjects remained untouched. Please keep in mind, Clement and the team, that thanks are (almost) always implied – but thank you so much for your work while I’m at it – and please take all the above as constructive criticism. Good luck ahead!
P.S. Almost forgot a couple other improvements to Nemo:
– context-menu option: Copy selected path (copy full path to selected file/folder to clipboard)
– context-menu entry Recase for renaming files and folders, with sub-entries:
— all lowercase (i.e. this is all lowercase)
— all uppercase (i.e. THIS IS ALL UPPERCASE)
— sentence case (i.e. This is sentence case)
— camel case (i.e. This Is Camel Case)
It would be nice if these were implemented by default, not expected to come from custom actions.
When LM 19.2 due?
Snap: I agree, Don’t let Snap sneakily install itself behind our backs! Make it so if an update tries to do that it gets blocked.
Talking With The Media: You should add a Media Enquiries section to your Contact Us web page
March: In the March news blog in the comments you (Clem) said, of considering dropping systemd or making it optional, that: “The only two reasons we would consider it are politics (its leadership, our influence in it and the fact that it’s getting bigger and it’s not modular) and PR (…)”
The fact that it’s getting bigger and it’s not modular is actually a *design* issue. I would love to see Mint giving an option to not use systemd.
You keep LMDE around to make sure you are not dependent on Ubuntu. I think it’s a similar concept to not become dependent on systemd.
Thanks for Mint, it’s great!
Hi, Clem! Really great job as usual! I tried both MATE and Cinnamon Linux Mint 19.2 beta version and the overall impression was really positive:
– first of all, the bootup both in MATE and in Cinnamon was really fast;
– RAM consumption, in addition, was amazingly and surprisingly low (about 600 MB in MATE and about 750 MB in Cinnamon);
– finally, applications ran really fine, even though, for instance, Clementine package should need a “graphical update” both in MATE and in XFCE as well.
Thus, I found this Linux Mint 19.2 BETA really successful and I cannot really wait for the official release as soon as possibile!
Best regards,
Jonathan
Great job on 19.2 Beta as usual. 2 small issues at my end. 1. I often have to right click twice within a directory to bring up the context menu. 2. I use Insync, & despite having the Insync-Nemo package installed there is no right click – Insync context available. This worked fine in 19.1. (Appreciate this may be an Insync not Mint issue)
Other than that Cinnamon runs a treat here.
It seems that in the same vein as Clem described above, Fedora moves in the direction to disable Snap support in Fedora 31 as Richard Hughes announced in the lists fedora project org on Thursday, 11 July 2019.
Used ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/testing/ reference from distronet.com to grab BETAs for testing.
Where might be best place to make issues or bugs known? So far within VirtualBox I haven’t been able to get LibreOffice to do editing of remote documents or presentations as I am able to do from my workstation to my remote account. Might be that I’m just not plugging in access password, as input menu isn’t clearly telling me which password to use each step of the way.
Ooops, I meant “from distrowatch.com to grab 19.2 BETAs for testing. My preference is MATE; but I like to check the others also.
I found a bug in Linux Mint 19.2 beta xfce 64 bits. Just after a fresh install, click on the start menu and type “Desktop Settings” in the search bar. Click on Desktop Settings and nothing happens.
Regards
Where do you find Mint 19.2 beta (preferably mate)?
Torrents: https://torrents.linuxmint.com/
ISOs: https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/testing/
Jerry and others:
Here is the information you were looking for:
https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_tina_cinnamon.php
Enjoy!
Bug in Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.2 beta.
When trying to view Linux Kernels in the update manager, it crashes & closes.
Best to post that in the announcement of that specific beta.
How to change icon size (NOT filename size) in Caja folder view?
https://otherlinuxmintblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/mint-book_023.png
How to change icon size of “AuthorBundle”, but not filename text “AuthorBundle”?
You’ll get some help with that if you post your question on the Mint forum.
https://forums.linuxmint.com
There is a bug in 19.1 when ever we working doing things , the CD always sounds wants running in Ubuntu
same lap top HP brand new 2 years old it never does that? Please kindly fix this bug.
If snap breaks apt, then choose apt – what ever the price is.
All my personal work is 32-bit and also 16-bit – I’ve never asked for, or needed, 64-bit CPUs. If Linux Mint will not support 32-bit applications it means leaving Linux Mint after more then a decade and using another platform. As bad (really) as it is for me, because I don’t want to leave Linux Mint.
i.e. the 32-bit libraries must be available to download from the console – or even better, from a GUI: “Install 32-bit support”!
BTW, 64-bit is not “going forward” – is “going backward”.
It kills hundreds of thousands (probably much more) of already made applications, by so many independent developers, and it gives a total control for the big corporations, which have the resources, time and money to reinvent the wheel in 64-bit.
64-bit is the most bad news ever for probably millions of independent developers – it serves the financial interests of basically two major corporations: Google and Microsoft. It’s too sad to even talk about it. IMHO it is a very calculated move, i.e. a fraud. This is my personal opinion.
Anyway, more and more I’m using x86 emulators. That is what left after the 64-bit destructive storm. I’m not the only one who feels like this of course. For the average user there is no real benefit in 64-bit CPU: 32-bit CPU and 4GB RAM was/is more then enough for the vast majority of users.
Just an example: https://www.rapideuphoria311.com/ — how will I manage a project like this in an Only 64-bit system???
OS is just a platform which we use to get works done with different application softwares. The application softwares are also not the purpose, the purpose is to get stuff done.
Being said that, If you ask me, app store is the most important component for a OS to shine. I believe that the only thing stopping Linux to take at least 40% market share in desktop is a great app store with SDK for developers to flourish. People should be able to sell their property or open source software in Linux.
Let’s be real here, every distribution has a app store, every distribution owner dream it to be the next Apple store. In case of apple, the OS and the app store is owned by the same people. Profit made by each sale goes to one organization. But it is different in case of Linux. OS belongs to someone and app store belongs to someone else. So, the profit must be shared.
I think Linux Mint should use a app store like Snap. I believe Linux Mint should be able to make money out of the app store. Ex. For every app sold, app store gets X%, the OS hosting the app store gets Y%. Snap should allocate a % of the budget to develope a SDK that developers can use to make apps that will works seamlessly with Cinnamon and other popular DE. The SDK should be easy and modern. Ex. can use Electron and golang (C is too much for most of us).
Now let’s address the issues regarding Snap.
1. Installing Snap does not mean you can not use another app store. Yes, you can replace Google Play in Android as well.
2. “When Flatpak came out it immediately allowed anyone to create stores. The Flatpak client can talk to multiple stores. Spotify is on Flathub and they can push towards it. If tomorrow they have an argument with Flathub they can create their own store and the very same Flatpak client will still work with it.” Does not sound like a store that can replace Apple or Play Store. Commercially it makes no sense. Letting people modify, rebuild, pin, patch, mirror a snap etc. Even makes less sense for a viable app store. However, having flatpak is Good for us. So, if Snap try to be coocky, we can move to flatpak. Anyhow, if you want to do real business, you have to go with Snap.
3. Regarding Spotify, every app developer should have the right to choose the platform to distribute their app. It is the duty of the distribution owner to make the platforms available.
4. If snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account then how will I keep track of my purchases? Where shall I keep my app specific configurations? App should be restored with all configurations intact.
5. “Who controls all that and what does it mean for us ? Who governs what can and cannot go into the store ? Who makes commercial deals ? Who do we rely on ? A Fedora user shouldn’t be told about Ubuntu and Ubuntu One when downloading software. His browser shouldn’t have bookmarks pointing to another distribution. His software shouldn’t be designed and tested primarily with another desktop environment and distribution in mind, and when he looks at screenshots he shouldn’t see Ubuntu everywhere”. These questions, you have to figure out sitting with the Snap developers. This is called business. I think Mint has grown large enough to do business with Canonical. The only thing I can tell is, without governance there is only chaos.
6. I do not mind my apps or even Linux Mint collecting data to make the UX better and add features. You just have to take my permission and let me know what data you are collecting.
Canonical has invested a lot and deserve some profit. So does Linux Mint. To, tell the truth without Mark Shuttleworth & Clement Lefebvre I would not be able to use Linux today as my desktop. I want these two people to work together. With few right moves, Windows will probably be forced to open it’s source codes to stay in business. I hope you make the best out of the meeting with Snap developers.
re: Chuck
July 10, 2019 at 4:42 pm
I have been working on computers since 1972 and the thing that bugged me was how people rejected computers as soon as they weren’t mint (no pun intended). One of the things that is most laudable about Linux is the ability to take an old machine and make it behave like a new one. Not everyone has a ton of disposable income to keep buying the newest and hottest technology. Many of us (and more every day) have to make do with what we have and Linux raises above the others in allowing us to get the job done without having t beg, borrow, or steal a new machine.
I faced a bug in Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.2 beta.
Please Canonical, don’t drop deb packages support, please!