 In the last couple of days, one of the most popular Linux desktop distributions, Linuxmin, had a new big release. They released version 20.3, codenamed Una. And today I'm going to take a quick look at Linuxmin 20.3, their Cinnamon edition, to show you guys what's new, what's the same, and just to take a quick first look around. Before running through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine, I do want to briefly cover the release notes for this edition because version 20.3 has some known issues for the Cinnamon edition that I'm going to take a look at. This is the release notes for that particular edition. But some of these known issues affect all the editions of Linuxmin. The very first one, the Snap store is disabled in Linuxmin 20. The Snap store is your software center that includes all the Snap packages that are in the Snapcraft store. And by default, Linuxmin, a couple of versions ago, made the decision to remove snaps from Linuxmin. They don't want anything to do with the Snap store. They don't want anything to do with Snap packages in general. They make it so that there's no snaps installed by default. And if you want to install snaps, you have to jump through some hoops to install the SnapD Daemon. And not everybody was thrilled about that decision. But it's their distribution they've decided they don't want anything to do with snaps and they prefer to use flat packs instead. So just know that snaps are not a part of Linuxmin 20.3. Most of you that are testing this out in VirtualBox know that there are some graphics issues with testing Linuxmin Cinnamon inside VirtualBox. They give you some tips. If you end up with a garbled screen, what they want you to do is they want you to change to a different TTY inside the VirtualBox and then switch back to the TTY that your graphical session was actually launched in and that should fix that garbled screen issue. I've always had issues with Linuxmin Cinnamon in VirtualBox today. I'm actually going to install this using VertManager instead of VirtualBox. So hopefully I shouldn't get that garbled screen issue. They give you some other VirtualBox tips on how to get your guest session set up and your touchpad drivers. They also tell you how to install wine inside Linuxmin. So all you need to do is do a sudo apt install wine-installer and that is a meta package not just for wine but also it installs a package called the wine-desktop-files which basically it adds menu entries for your regedit, for your virtual C drive, for your Windows programs that you're installing inside wine. So that is actually a nice little addition. For those of you that use wine, I'm not a wine user. I don't particularly like installing Windows applications inside Linux. I much prefer if I'm going to install a Windows application, typically I'm just going to install a Windows virtual machine and then install the Windows applications in the Windows virtual machine because they're guaranteed to work because your virtual machine is actually Windows. Where wine is more of an emulator, technically it's not an emulator but it's a Windows emulator and it's hit or miss. Your Windows programs, they may work in wine. They may not. So I'm not a big fan of wine but those of you that want to try it out, I do appreciate the fact that they have this meta package wine-installer available. They also mention some sound and microphone issues that are related to pulse audio volume control and they also mention that VLC does have an annoying bug where sometimes it doesn't have a playback available for you. What you need to do is you need to actually specify the device by going in the menu system and specifying slash dev slash SR0 as the disk device and then VLC playback should work just fine for you. So let me switch over to my desktop and let's run through a quick installation. So I'm going to install this again inside VRT Manager and I gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM and two cores of my CPU. So let me go into the menu system here before I run through the installation and look for the display program and let's see if I can set this to 1920 by 1080. Hit apply just to get a better screen resolution here. Keep this configuration. All right. And then I'm going to click on the icon right here on the desktop that says install Linux Mint and this is the installer by default. It has chosen English for the language. That's correct for me. So I'll click continue and then keyboard layout. That English US has been selected and that's correct for me. So I'll click continue, install multimedia codex. So this is your third party multimedia codex and this is to get VLC and your multimedia stuff to actually work correctly. So you do want to take that on. So then click continue and then the installation type. Do you want to erase the entire disk and give Linux Mint the entire disk or do you want to choose something else which is you're going to manually partition your drives and this is important. If you were dual booting alongside another operating system like Windows, for example, but I'm going to erase the entire disk and give Linux Mint the entire disk and then click install now and it's going to tell me it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. And of course, there's no coming back from this once I click continue and away it goes and now it's asking about time zone. It's correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'll just click continue and then we need to create our username and our password. So my username is going to be DT and my password for the DT user is going to be a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. And then confirm that strong and complicated password. Login automatically it's ticked off by default. I will leave that ticked off by default because the point of creating such a strong and complicated password is to actually have to type it to get into my computer. So require password to log in is ticked on by default. I'll leave that and then encrypt my home folder. If you're doing this on especially a machine that other people have access to you may want to encrypt your home folder. For me, nobody's going to have access to my equipment. So typically I don't encrypt my home folder. So I'll click continue. But if I was installing this on a laptop for example that anybody could just open and get into or somebody could steal my laptop and then get into the hard drive and steal all the data off my hard drive. It's important especially for a laptop that you probably should encrypt your home directory just in case that machine is ever stolen. Nobody can get into it other than you because they would need your key. And the installation has completed. The installation took about 10 minutes and I'm going to click restart now. Just remove the installation media and then press enter. So I'm actually going to have to go into the settings and remove the installation media. So I'm going to force the VM off and then go in here. I'm going to go into the boot options and make sure you have the SATA CD ROM actually has already been turned off. It turned it off automatically. So now I'm going to restart the VM. Let me make that full screen and let's boot into our freshly installed Linux Mint 20.3, the Cinnamon Edition codenamed Una. And let's enter our strong and complicated password. And it's saying check the video drivers. That's just a virtual machine bug. Again, Cinnamon doesn't really like playing well inside virtual machines. I'm going to hit the super key to launch the menu system and I'm going to search for display one more time. And once again, I'm going to change the screen resolution to 1920 by 1080. Hit apply, hit keep this configuration. And that should be the last time I ever have to do that now that this is an actually installed version of Linux Mint. It should always remember every time I launched this virtual machine going forward that I want 1920 by 1080 for screen resolution. So let me go through the menu system here and show you what is installed by default in Linux Mint 20.3. So under the accessories category, we have our archive manager. So this is for zip, unzip, that sort of thing. We have our calculator. And I believe this is the same as the GNOME calculator. Yeah, this is GNOME's calculator 3.36. They're going to use a lot of the standard GNOME applications because it's a GTK based desktop Cinnamon is also under accessories. We have GNOME's character map. We have GNOME disk. This is just to see your partition scheme and everything for your drives that are installed on your computer. Also under accessories, we have our document viewer. They launched the document viewer and if I go to about. This is X reader. So this is to read like your PDFs and things like that. Also under accessories, we have file renamer. We have just files and that's going to be our file manager. And I believe that is going to be Nemo. Yeah, this is Nemo 5.2.3. Nemo is widely regarded as one of the better file managers on Linux. It is a old fork of the old Nautilus file manager before the GNOME project really gimped Nautilus to the point where it was practically unusable. Also under accessories, we have GNOME fonts. We have our image viewer. We have a note taking application that's just called notes. And of course, this is just like putting sticky notes on your desktop and things like that. Not something that I actually would use. But I know a lot of you guys do love your note taking applications. Also under accessories, we have the onboard keyboard. And that's for people that need an accessible onscreen keyboard. We have our password and keys tool. We have Redshift, which adjusts your color temperature for your monitors depending on the time of day. And that's supposed to be better for your eyes and just better for your health. We have our screenshot application. We have the text editor, which I believe is Zed, which is a fork of the old G edit. Yeah, and this is Zed 3.2.2. It's very similar to G edit. It even installs G edit plugins just fine. Also under accessories, we have a USB writer, a USB stick for matter. And that's for creating your USB drives for burning like Linux ISOs to USB drives. And we also have the warpinator. The warpinator is basically it's a way to send files to other computers on your network. If I go into preferences, I may never actually use the warpinator because usually I just do everything over SSH typically when I'm remoting into other machines or moving files from one machine to a remote machine. But it allows you to go into connection and set up your ports and set up your firewall rules and all of that need application to include with a Linux distribution under the graphics category. We have our document scanner. Not too many people have the need for a scanning utility these days, but there's one included in Linux Mint in case you need it. There's also a program called drawing, which I'm not sure what that program is. Let's see if I go into help and about drawing. This is drawing 0.8.4. And this is a drawing application for the GNOME desktop. So I'm assuming it's one of the GNOME applications, part of their suite of applications. We also have a program called pics, which is to view and organize your images. So this is basically a photo manager is what this is. If I go into help about pics.2.8 and image viewer and browser. One interesting thing when I opened up the drawing application, it was the light theme, which every program I had opened up so far had been a light GTK thing. But pics when I open it up, it is a dark GTK theme by default. That's kind of interesting that some of the applications are light and some of them are dark. Under the internet category, Firefox is our default web browser. That's standard on most Linux distributions these days. Underbird is the default desktop email client. Transmission is our BitTorrent client, and that is GNOME's transmission BitTorrent client. And it's a standard, probably the most popular BitTorrent client on Linux. It's one I actually use when I have the need for torrenting. Also under internet, we had HexChat, which is our IRC chat application. And let's see if I click on HexChat, does it automatically log us into the Linux Mint IRC channel? It does, it looks like, yeah. So that's a great way of getting immediate support. If you have a support kind of question about your Linux Mint installation, for example, you're having trouble installing it, that's nice that they have HexChat already installed and set up to automatically connect to the Linux Mint channel. Let me quit out of that. And I noticed HexChat did put a cistrate icon down here, but it closed that icon when I exited out of HexChat. Under the office category, we have the entire LibreOffice suite. I'm going to open up LibreOfficeRider. Let's see what version we are on here. We don't need any LibreOffice tips. Let me close that window and go to help about LibreOffice. This is LibreOffice version 6.4.7.2. And let's close that out. And under our sound and video category, we have Celluloid, which I believe is our movie player. So let me close that out. I noticed the Celluloid movie player looked like it was a dark theme rather than a light theme. And then we have Hypnotix, which is a custom application for Linux Mint. And this is the ability to watch TV, regional TV, based on your location. So this is one of the applications that Linux Mint really touted in their release notes. And I've never actually used this application, but let's just go to TV Channels. And let's see if I can go to my location. Wonder if I just type United States. Would it actually launch something? Yeah, I don't know. I've never actually used this application. So bear with me just for a second. Let me go to TV Channels, Turkey. Well, here, USA. And I would assume something would launch here. I'm just still looking for my search term. So let me clear the search term. Yeah, nothing appears to be launching here. I don't know. That could be an issue with the VM. Let's search for something in the UK. Well, the UK channels actually show up. Let me go to ITV2. And I've waited about a minute now for that channel to load. Let me try a different channel. Okay, something finally happened here. The Update Manager popped up, but that's not part of Hypnotics. That's just Linux Mint, letting me know there's an update available. But it finally did load one of the channels I clicked on. And can I make it full screen? I can. I like the player control right here. As soon as you get inside the player itself, you get your controls here. Yeah, so it does work. It just took a minute. And that probably is not a issue necessarily with the application itself, you know, as far as being slow or whatever. It's a network problem because obviously we're streaming this, you know, from the internet. One interesting thing is that hitting the close button does not actually kill this MPV window. So it opened up the program, you know, it starts live streaming the program directly in MPV, but I can't actually kill this. So pro tip for those of you that are new to Linux, when you ever get a window that's frozen or stuck, open a terminal and then type the word X kill. And when you hit X kill, your cursor turns into an X and then find the window that is causing you a problem that you for whatever reason can't kill and click on it. And X kill will kill it. It will basically force it to go away. So that is a neat little trick. If you ever have a issue where a program crashes and you just can't get the window off your screen, you just can't get it to close, X kill always will kill the program. Also under sound and video, we had rhythm box, which is our music player, rhythm box, one of the best audio players on Linux. It's one of the standard GNOME applications as well. Now, one interesting thing I noticed about the sound and video category, the release notes mentioned some issues that people were having with video playback and audio playback using VLC, but VLC is not actually installed. They had celluloid for a video player and rhythm box for an audio player and VLC is not installed, but I guess they included those release notes about VLC because so many people install VLC. Now, let me go into the settings manager here. So this settings, system settings program here is kind of like your control panel for those of you used to the control panel in Windows. It's basically just a collection of various preference programs that you can change things like password and your username, add users, delete users, you can change your desktop theme and things like that. If I click on desktop and I see we have desktop icons turned on, I hate desktop icons. That's just a personal thing for me. Desktop icons, the way they clutter up the desktop on Windows is one thing, but those of us that use Linux, we typically don't throw stuff on our desktop. We like having clean desktops and I'm going to turn all of that off, and then I'm going to click the back arrow and then I'm going to click on themes. Let's go ahead and see what themes are installed by default. One interesting thing about the new release here of Linux Mint 20.3 is they did include some new theming. You see a lot of flatter theming. We have rounded corners and to be honest, it looks a lot more modern. I really like the various colored icon sets and everything here. The window borders, you can either have the rounded borders, Mint Y, or you can have Mint X, which is just slightly rounded borders, and you can see not quite as tall. I kind of like the more minimal look, but I'm going to go back to the default look for now. And of course, you can change the desktop theme. Of course, this is going to be the theme of the panel and the menu system, which by default is set to Mint Y dark. So it's a dark theme for the panel menu system and by default, it's a light theme for your actual Windows. This actually changed the GTK theme from a light theme to a dark theme. By default, the light theme, if I go to controls, it's Mint Y, but there is Mint Y dark, which is just a darker theme with the same green accents. One of the things that Linux Mint did this time around with their theming is they decided to go a little easier on like the green accents or whatever color accents you chose by default, it's green. You know, you can see in the GTK theme, if I open up the Nemo file manager, there's not as much green going on. I mean, the icon set is green, but the GTK theme has very little green accents in it anymore other than the close button that is green. You know, they've really toned that down. I think that's a nice touch. I think it's a little more minimal and honestly, it's a little more modern feeling. Let me close out the system settings. And I'm going to right click on the desktop and change desktop background. And let's go ahead and check out some of the wallpapers. It doesn't look like there's any new wallpapers. These are all the same wallpapers from the previous versions of Linux Mint. I did want to check out maybe a lighter wallpaper since I'm using a dark theme. You know, it makes sense to have a lighter wallpaper, but really our only options are the green Linux Mint branded wallpapers, which I don't necessarily mind. I mean, that's not horrible. I do think, yeah, that is a nice contrast compared to now our dark windows as well as our dark desktop theme as well. One other thing they mentioned in the release notes for the 20.3 is they have a new application called Thingy. Now Thingy, when you search for it, doesn't actually come up. The program is actually called library. I'm not exactly sure why that is. That library may be the generic name and Thingy may be the official name. If I go into the hamburger menu and do about, yeah, the program name is actually called Thingy. Thingy 1.0.5. I guess the generic name is library. This is a document viewer. And you're like, well, X reader was here. That's a document viewer. Yes, Thingy is the new document viewer, kind of like hypnotics for the internet TV is a program that the Linux Mint team is working on heavily. They're also working on this Thingy program. And this is a library for your PDFs and for your EPUB files. So this is pretty much for those of you that do like EPUB reading on your computer. And I'm one of those people. I don't mind having an application, especially if it's a good application, to manage all of my documents that I read on my computer. So that's an interesting little bit of work that the Linux Mint team is putting in. Looking at the panel down here, the sentiment panel, it looks the same as before. So far as you got your start menu, then you've got your quick launchers, then you've got the task bar. This is where your applications that you launch will sit. And then you have your sys tray icons here at the far left. Let me move my head out of the way. We have our time. And if I hover over it, we get the date. And then if I click on the time, you get your calendar and your events. There's no events. If I click on it, can I actually schedule an event? Yes. Then the calendar application will launch. Maybe I could schedule an event. Yeah, just click on today. And I will say, buy some beer. Exclamation hit add. And now that's in my events list. And now when I click on the calendar notification down here or the time notification, I get the calendar. And you see nine here on the calendar, January 9th. I have it has a dot below it, letting me know there's an event there. And the event is scheduled all day by some beer. All right. So that is that. And one last thing I want to do is I want to do control all T to bring up the terminal. And I'm going to make the terminal full screen. And let me zoom in here. If I remember the commands to zoom in on this particular terminal, what terminal are they using inside Linux Mint Cinnamon? They're using the GNOME terminal 3.36.2. Now, just to verify, I'm going to do a snap list. Just to verify that snaps are not here. I'm also going to do a flat pack list. Just to verify that there are no flat packs installed. If I did where is flat pack is flat pack. Flat pack is installed as far as the flat pack program, but they did not install any flat packs out of the box. So that's very important. Flat packs are here. They're ready for you. You can use it if you want to use it. Linux Mint does not automatically install any flat packs for you. So that's a very nice touch. Let the user decide whether they want to use these containerized formats or not. I'm going to do a unnamed dash R. Let's get the kernel version. We're on kernel 5.4.0. So it's an older kernel, but it's an older kernel because that's the older Ubuntu LTS kernel that Linux Mint is basing off of. Again, Linux Mint is not a rolling release distribution. It's a stable distribution, static release distribution. So things are a little older on it, but of course they do that for stability reasons. And if I did an apt, space, list, space dash, dash installed, let's get a list of every package installed using the apt package manager. And it spits them out one line at a time. So if I up arrow and get that same command, the apt list dash, dash installed command, and this time pipe it into WC, the word count program, space dash L for line count. It will tell me how many lines were in that output. 2006. So 2006, that is the number of packages that are installed using the apt package manager. Inside Linux Mint 20.3. So that's just a very cursory look at Linux Mint 20.3 codenamed Una. That's the Cinnamon edition. I will say it looks great. It looks a lot more modern than it has in the past. In the past, I found Linux Mint looked a little old, right? Just the theming, it all had kind of more of a retro kind of look to it. Where now some of the just minor tweaks to the GTK theme, the fact that they eased up on the green accents, the rounded corners, I like the button controls, the window controls and everything. You know, it's starting to look a lot more like a modern, like a ultra modern desktop environment rather than something that you would have seen, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And I like that. I really like the new branding, the Linux Mint logo. If you've been to the Linux Mint website, you can see they put in a lot of work on a new modern design for their website, which the Linux Mint website really needed an update. But it's got a major facelift now. And I think Linux Mint, so many Linux distributions, they kind of lose their way after a few years and they don't know where they're going, where Linux Mint has always been going the same direction forever. They've always been that Linux distribution that was solely focused on delivering the best desktop experience to the most desktop users. And I think Linux Mint has always kind of hit that out of the park and they continue to do that. This new release, by the way, 20.3, is a long-term support release. It's going to be supported, I believe, until the year 2025. So if you install Linux Mint Una today, you've got at least the next four years before you have to upgrade to the next major release of Linux Mint. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Devon Gabe James, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Akami Allen, Linux Ninja Joe, Commander, Angry Kurt, Dai Yokai, David Dillon, Gregory Heiko, Costco Lee, Maxim Mike Nitros, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archon from Door, Polly Day, River Red Prophet, Steven and more like these guys. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick first look at Linux Mint 20.3 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these fine ladies and gentlemen. These names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. You know, if you like the work I'm doing, if you like these great videos about Linux and free and open source software, and you want to support me, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Congratulations to the Mint team. Solid release, guys.