Linux Mint 17.2 offers desktop familiarity and responds to user wants

These days, the desktop OSes grabbing headlines have, for the most part, left the traditional desktop behind in favor of what's often referred to as a "shell." Typically, such an arrangement offers a search-based interface. In the Linux world, the GNOME project and Ubuntu's Unity desktop interfaces both take this approach.

This is not a sea change that's limited to Linux, however. For example, the upheaval of the desktop is also happening in Windows land. Windows 8 departed from the traditional desktop UI, and Windows 10 looks like it will continue that rethinking of the desktop, albeit with a few familiar elements retained. Whether it's driven by, in Ubuntu's case, a vision of "convergence" between desktop and mobile or perhaps just the need for something new (which seems to be the case for GNOME 3.x), developers would have you believe that these mobile-friendly, search-based desktops are the future of, well, everything.

There are, however, some holdouts. These desktops defiantly stick with the traditional task bar and start menu-style interface. Apple's OS X has thus far been surprisingly conservative about changing its basic metaphors, but then the company has iOS to tantalize developers.

In the Linux world, holdouts including both KDE and Xfce continue to be more or less what they have always been. The word "solid" comes to mind. They're both solid options, but the words "fun" or "exciting" don't exactly spring to mind.

Now relying on an Ubuntu LTS base, Mint update shows the distro's strategy is on point.
Linux Mint on the other hand has managed to do something a bit different, particularly with its Cinnamon desktop. The Mint project recently released Mint 17.2, a significant upgrade for the Ubuntu-based distro that has become one of Linux's most popular. And while Mint overall manages to be among the last holdouts of the traditional desktop computing paradigm, this iteration manages to feel both familiar and modern at the same time.

In general, Mint is Ubuntu for people who don't like the Unity desktop. If you essentially want Ubuntu and all the good that comes with it (like an extensive up-to-date set of packages, great documentation, and a Web full of tutorials and helpful users) and not Unity and its baggage (like query-logging search "features" some have called spyware), Linux Mint is likely the distro for you. From my experience, most things that work in Ubuntu will also work in Mint. So all those tutorials and .deb files will in most cases (not all though) serve a Mint user just fine.

Of course, Mint is also notable because of its dual homegrown desktops, Cinnamon and MATE. Both are the rare desktops that both offer task bars, system trays, docks, and other familiar metaphors for interacting with and managing your applications and files. And while Linux Mint 17.2 does have that of-note Cinnamon offering we mentioned, those looking for alternatives to Unity and GNOME 3 will continue to find everything they love about Ubuntu without the Unity Desktop.
Cinnamon 2.6

If you head over to the Linux Mint website, you'll find two different downloads available, one for the Cinnamon desktop and one for the MATE desktop. Opt for the former and you'll get Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon 2.6.
Enlarge / Cinnamon 2.6 in Linux Mint 17.2.

Out of the box, Cinnamon rather closely resembles Windows XP, albeit with a mintier green-gray theme. You'll find all the familiar elements of traditional desktops: a start menu, task bar, and so on. If Windows XP isn't your idea of a good-looking desktop, fear not, Cinnamon is highly customizable, and there are a ton of themes and useful applets available for download.

Among the more obvious new features in this release are better dual monitor support, some new tricks for the panel, and a much faster overall desktop experience.

The latter point—speed improvements—is particularly evident on older hardware. Cinnamon 2.6 is still not by any means a lightweight desktop, nor would it be my first choice for less powerful hardware, but this release is a bit less taxing on older systems. Among the improvements are some code optimizations that have reduced the amount of background refreshes that happen. The menu, for instance, is refreshed about six times less, and the window manager has been overhauled to reduce idle CPU use.

For more details on all the under-the-hood speed improvements in Cinnamon 2.6, check out Linux Mint lead Clément Laforge's blog post on the subject. Since brevity is the essence of Linux reviews, suffice it to say that Linux Mint 17.2 is noticeably snappier than its predecessor on the same hardware, something disappointingly few desktops can claim these days.

The new and improved dual monitor support primarily addresses a longtime complaint from Cinnamon users with more than one screen: there was no way to set up your panels independently. That's been fixed, which means you can now have a completely different panel on each of your monitors. In fact, you don't have to have multiple screens to take advantage of this one. The updates to the panel mean you can now set up your single monitor with multiple instances; for example, one at the top and bottom of your screen (though I'm not sure why you'd want to).

Wait, did you catch that in the last paragraph? Cinnamon 2.6 has a new feature that addresses a longtime complaint from users. In fact, there are quite a few new features that can be traced right back to user-submitted bugs and feature requests, which is another thing that feels increasingly rare in Linux desktops.

This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making it a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game.
Enlarge / The Inhibit applet in action.

Sure, you could accomplish all those before using a couple of different panes in the system settings app, but with an applet you can just drop it in the menu bar and click to easily toggle things on and off. It's not a huge new feature, but it's great to have, and it solves the kind of real-world problem ordinary users encounter.

Along similar lines, Cinnamon has an improved sound applet, which supports PulseAudio and has the ability to "detect output devices with greater accuracy." In practical terms, that means more outputs "just work." There's also a new feature to set the volume level independently for each running application.

If you've used Cinnamon for a long time, you may well remember some bad old days of desktop freezes and other crashes. This used to happen so much that I had a Bash shortcut just to restart Cinnamon. As I noted in my review of Mint 17.1, I haven't had this problem for some time on any of my hardware, but if you do you'll be glad to know there's now a keyboard shortcut to restart Cinnamon. By default it's Ctrl+Alt+Escape, which will restart both the Nemo file manager and the cinnamon-settings-daemon in order to launch a brand new instance of Cinnamon.

That's a bit cleaner than good old Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which kills your session and can potentially lose your work. With Ctrl+Alt+Escape, your session stays as it was, including any open apps with unsaved work. I've been using Cinnamon 2.6 for a while now, though, and haven't needed to restart it yet.

Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon is well worth the upgrade. In fact, even if you're using Cinnamon elsewhere (an increasingly common scenario with Debian and Fedora now including Cinnamon as an option in their installers), I'd suggest updating to this. The speed improvements alone are worth it.

Just like its cohort Cinnamon, the MATE update has seen quite a bit of work go into speeding up the desktop experience and bringing down the memory requirements. Unlike Cinnamon, though, MATE is what passes for a "lightweight" desktop these days, which is to say that particularly the memory use improvements will be a huge win for anyone using MATE on older, less capable hardware. MATE is not LXDE or bare Openbox by any means, but neither is it anywhere near as big and memory hungry as GNOME 3 or Unity.

That said, I didn't really notice the speed improvements. Depending on your hardware and use habits, you may find that MATE 1.10 is faster, but MATE has always been pretty speedy, so sometimes it's hard to tell. It does definitely use less RAM though.

Beyond the speed and RAM improvements, you won't likely notice a lot of changes in this version of MATE. The default file manager in MATE can now enable and disable extensions without a restart and the MATE documentation is now available within the desktop interface.

The developers of MATE have initiated a similar "paper cut" project for MATE to fix some of the small issues and also to port some of the new Cinnamon features into MATE, but so far it doesn't look like much has happened. The MATE 1.10 release announcement says that these should come as updates to MATE 1.10.x, so expect to see a few things updated and optimized as the 1.10.x release cycle continues.

Like Cinnamon, MATE has also grown beyond Linux Mint. In fact, there's now an official Ubuntu flavor based on MATE. Given that Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu, it's worth asking why not just use Ubuntu MATE? Well, if you want the latest version of Ubuntu, need an up-to-date kernel to support new hardware, or prefer pure Ubuntu, then Ubuntu MATE is probably a better choice.

There's more to Linux Mint than just the desktop, though. And while this release retains the base system of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, there are plenty of improvements to the tools and applications that make Mint, well, Mint.
Linux Mint 17.2

Overall, Linux Mint 17.2 ships with a slew of updates that apply regardless of the desktop you choose.

Among the places Mint trumps Ubuntu is the Update Manager, which goes well beyond the usual package manager, offering up what amounts to a user-friendly tour of the system via package updates. If you really want to know what's going on with your system and how various package updates relate to one another, the Mint Update Manager is one of the best ways I've seen to wrap your head around it.

The latest feature is support package aliases, which sounds obscure but is actually very simple. It just means that a package with an otherwise obscure name like "cjs" can be displayed as "cinnamon-cjs" so that it appears alongside other Cinnamon updates and, perhaps more importantly, so that you can tell it's connected in some way to Cinnamon. This makes it easier to debug things after an update if something on your system breaks. Even if you have no idea what "cjs" does (for the record, it's a JavaScript/C bridge), at least you know it's part of Cinnamon.
Enlarge / Viewing updates in Linux Mint 17.2.

The paper cuts theme mentioned earlier extends beyond the desktops as well. Among the small things in the Update Manager is an option to hide the system tray icon when no updates are available, which keeps your panel a little less cluttered.

Part of the appeal of using Ubuntu is the wealth of .deb packages out there. In general those same third-party packages will also work in Mint, which is great... until it isn't. The problem with .deb files is that you never really know what's in them unless you check and, let's face it, you don't. At any rate, Mint makes it a little easier to check out exactly what you're getting with an update to the Software Sources configuration tool.

With Mint 17.2, you can now open PPA archives and browse their packages. You can also then install them right from Software Sources; you don't have to switch to another tool. But more importantly you can easily purge .deb packages you installed manually. Just remove the repository/PPA and update. Sure, you can do that from the command line, too, but doing it through Software Source will be much easier for most users.
Enlarge / Inspecting PPA contents in Linux Mint 17.2

If you do prefer the command line, there are a couple of updates there as well, including support for an interesting command, "apt recommends," which will list missing recommended packages for a particular package. It's sort of like a post installation way to inspect what happens if you use "--no-install-recommends."
Ubuntu 14.04 Core

The controversial "systemd" comes to an OS known for stability.
As mentioned earlier, Linux Mint 17.2 sticks with Ubuntu 14.04 under the hood. That means the kernel remains at 3.16, which might be bad news for newer hardware. Naturally you can update the kernel yourself, although unless you really know what you're doing I don't suggest it.

There is one big upside to sticking with Ubuntu 14.04 as the base for Mint 17.2—there's still no systemd. Mint users won't have to deal with systemd for another year when Mint will make the leap to Ubuntu 16.04 as the new base system. That makes Mint 17.2 a good option for those who want to have an updated desktop in the Ubuntu ecosystem but postpone the move to systemd for a little while.
Conclusion

Mint 17.2 is well worth the upgrade, though much of what you want from it might be easier to get by just upgrading Cinnamon or MATE on their own. The Mint Linux upgrade guide tends to emphasize the wisdom on the old saying, "if it ain't broke..." Those are good words to live by, but that said, I had no trouble at all upgrading from Mint 17.1. All you need to do is open Update Manager and head to the Edit menu, where you should see an option to "Upgrade to Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela."

Linux Mint 17.2 is an LTS release and will receive security updates until 2019. And until 2016, all Mint releases will continue to use the same base package system (Ubuntu 14.04). Maintaining desktop familiarity may never be easier.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...hnology+Lab%29