 A few days ago, Linux Mint released a new version, 21.1, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to download and install the latest release of Linux Mint 21.1, their Cinnamon Edition, and let's discuss some of what has changed in this latest release. So I have installed Linux Mint here inside a virtual machine. The installer for Linux Mint 21.1 is the same ubiquity installer that Ubuntu uses, and the installation process is essentially the same process if you've ever installed Ubuntu or any of the Ubuntu official flavors. When you first log into Linux Mint, you get your welcome screen here, but one thing you'll notice that has changed, there are no longer any icons on the desktop. They have tidied up the desktop because I think they've realized that most people probably don't use icons on the desktop. You really didn't need like home and trash and network and things like that icons for that on the desktop because you have a link to the file manager, right? You have a quick launcher here in your file manager that has all of those bookmarks essentially for those places available. Also, you have ways to get to that stuff here inside the places section of the menu system. So I think that was a very good idea on their part to clean up the desktop a little bit. You can have icons on the desktop. They just don't put that stuff there by default anymore. Another thing I've noticed is that the design is a little flatter. I've noticed we don't have any real rounded corners. There's a little bit of rounded cornerness to it that is a word, but just very slightly. This looks a lot more slick, a lot more modern. I think the theming and all looks a lot more modern. The fact that we've got rid of those desktop icons, which are kind of a legacy thing that Windows users were doing 30, 40 years ago, this looks a lot more fresh, in my opinion. Another small change that is noticeable, if I go into system settings here and I go into themes, and let's take a look at the desktop themes. And while there is a lot of themes available for you, depending on what kind of accent colors you want to choose, the accent colors now are a little more saturated. They're a little more vibrant. It's especially noticeable if I go into applications here, go to the application color themes. You can see some of the accents for the red color, the purple color, this teal color. Again, they pop out a little bit more before they were a little less saturated and they didn't have that same kind of crispness, you know, if that is a word. One of the things about Linux Mint and its color schemes, they've always seemed a little dull to me. So I'm glad that they're working on having a little bit more vibrant color schemes. And of course, because I just installed this for the very first time, the update manager has automatically popped up on me, wanting to let me know that there may be some security updates and software updates available for me. I'm going to decline those for now. Now going back to the accent colors and the theming, if I relaunch the welcome screen, you will actually be able to choose some of this from within the welcome screen itself. So if I go to first steps, this is the very first time you've ever run Linux Mint, you may want to read some of this stuff, but you can go ahead and choose your accent color. So maybe I want my accent color to be, I don't know, this orange color here. Maybe instead of a dark theme or a light theme, you know, I want a dark theme. Yeah, you can toggle that on and off. So by default, it's a light theme, but we can toggle on the dark theme. You can also toggle on whether you want the panel layout to be modern or traditional. So traditional, I'm assuming is a more like a windows kind of traditional kind of look. You get your taskbar and all of that modern, a large panel with grouped windows and a small system tray. There's not much difference to it. It's it's a very subtle change, but I do like the modern look. You can also go ahead and set up your system snapshots. What this is is this takes a snapshot of your system. That way, if you do an update, for example, and it breaks the system, you can roll back to a previous working snapshot of your system. So this is done with a program called Timeshift. And Timeshift, what you do is you click next here. It's estimating the system size. It's the very first time you run it. It may take a little while, but after that, these snapshots, they run very quickly because after the first one, the next snapshot, it has to take a little just so. It only has to worry about changes on the system. Now, because I am in a VM, I do have to worry about space here. I may not want to run this, but say, you know, it's it's got my drive here. It knows I've got a 26 gig virtual drive in this virtual machine. Let's click on that. But I can set up when I want the snapshots to run weekly, monthly, daily, hourly, whatever it happens to be. You don't want to run it too often. Like running it every hour, you're going to take up a ton of space on the system and you want to make sure that the snapshots are scheduled for deletion. You want to make sure that you don't keep too many snapshots around. Just keep the latest, I don't know, three or four around because you could very quickly fill up a drive if you constantly take these snapshots and you never get rid of the old ones. So I'm going to close that out. That is time shift there. We also have our driver manager. This would be very important if I was doing this on physical hardware. This is would be where I would get my proprietary drivers for things like my Nvidia card or my Wi-Fi chips and things like that. The update manager, we've already seen automatically launch on us, letting us know that we need to take some software updates. We have the software manager, which has seen some changes. The software manager and also the update manager now support flat packs for installation and for updating. That's new for the update manager. So now we'll automatically update your flat packs for you. But flat pack integration should be out of the box here in Linux Mint. That has been the case for a few versions. Let me search for something that I know is only available as a flat pack or it's not available through the apt package manager. So some proprietary software like discord, for example, I know is available on flat hub as a flat pack. So if I click discord here and it'll let me know the repository it's installing from it's from flat hub. So this would install discord as a flat pack. If that's what I wanted to do, I'm going to decline taking that though. Getting back to the welcome screen under first steps. The last thing you could do is you could set up a firewall. If you wanted to, you could click launch. I believe this will be the UFW program, the uncomplicated firewall that Ubuntu uses and Linux Mint being an Ubuntu derivative. You it would also use UFW and that's exactly what it is launching here. This is G UFW the graphical or the GUI version of UFW. And I've done some videos on UFW in the past. Check those out if you need help setting up your firewall. One other thing I want to show you is I've just launched Firefox, the web browser, and I navigated to distrowwatch.com. I'm downloading the latest ISO for Linux Mint 21.1 here inside this virtual machine because I want to show you some really neat features they've added as far as verification of ISOs that you've downloaded. I finished downloading that ISO file that took a few minutes. Now I'm going to open the file manager, which of course is the Nemo file manager. I'm going to navigate to my downloads directory, which is where that ISO file was downloaded to. And now if I right click on this ISO file, you will see a new entry in our right click menu for verify. We can actually verify the ISO with this nice little graphical tool, ISO verification. And you can validate it or verify it with URLs, local files, check sums. It defaults to this URL. It'll go and I guess check it against these files here that are online. So let's click verify. Let's see if this actually works. And it says everything looks good. So this ISO, which I downloaded from a link on distrowwatch, so I expect that ISO to be safe. But you should always verify the ISOs. I know I almost never do that on camera, but it is good practice to verify the ISOs that you download. Also, if I go into the menu system and I search for a USB writer or what is it? USB image writer, let's go ahead and launch that program. It's going to ask for an ISO. So I'm going to go to downloads and I'm going to choose. And then it's going to ask for USB stick. I don't have a USB stick plugged in and configured for this virtual machine. But you can see in the USB image writer program, we also have verify. And if I click that, once again, it should launch our ISO verification program that we've already seen that way. Again, we verify the ISO before even burning it to a USB stick. One minor change to the panel is we used to have a quick launcher here, a little icon for show and hide the desktop to toggle show, hide the desktop. That icon is no longer here. This has been replaced with this little sliver here, this little bar, this a little lighter than the panel. If I move my head, you can see that it gives a little hint when I hover over it show desktop. So let me open a terminal, let me open a file manager, just have a couple programs open. And if I navigate to that little bar there, that little widget there and I click it, it hides the desktop. And if I click it again, it shows the desktop. Now let me hit Control Alt T to open up a terminal. Although there is a quick launcher here, I could have clicked with the mouse to get the terminal as well. And let me make this full screen and zoom in. Let's go ahead and do a uname dash R. What is the kernel version? The kernel is 5.15. If I do a apt list dash, dash installed, and then pipe that into the WC program WC dash L for a line count, see how many packages are installed with the apt package manager. 2,134. Let's see how many flat packs are installed out of the box. None, which is understandable. Flat pack is enabled, but they don't install anything as a flat pack. And I don't believe snaps are here at all. If I do a snap list, command snap is not found. If I do where is snap D? Yeah, snap D doesn't even exist on the system. So snaps are not here at all in Linux Mint. Even though it's a part of Ubuntu, which they base off of, they rip out snaps from Ubuntu and they choose to go with flat packs instead. One final thing I want to look at is the wallpaper pack with this new release because every new release should have a new wallpaper pack. And I do enjoy looking at these things. So if I right click on the desktop and choose change desktop background, we have a couple of different categories for wallpaper packs. We have this Linux Mint category, which is just the Linux Mint branded wallpapers, which are quite nice. And then we have Vanessa, which was the last release, I believe, of Linux Mint. So we've seen these wallpapers before and then Vera, which is this release. So 21.1 is codenamed Vera. And we have Frozen. Let's see what some of these look like. Yeah, these are really nice photographs and nature photography. I really like that picture there. I'm going to have to rip off some of this and this one here called Slovenia is really gorgeous. Yeah, I'm loving the wallpaper pack. Here's some abstract art. Yeah, I don't mind that either, like the accent color with the abstract art psychedelic. Yeah, that's not bad either. I like more minimal stuff here. So this one here, yeah, I could really work with something like that. But honestly, I was really digging that photo right there. I think that's the one I'm going to go with. So that's just a quick and cursory look at Linux Mint 21.1. There's Cinnamon in addition. This particular version of Linux Mint, by the way, will receive security updates until the year 2027. So if you install it and you want to run it for up to four years, that is available for you. I do want to congratulate the Linux Mint team on a job well done on this release. 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 Brian Gabe, James Mint, Maxim, Emmett, Mitchell, Paul West, while you're bowling homie, Alex, Armor Trek and Chuck, Commander Henry, Zeokai, George Lee, Maastrum, Nate Arion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archon, Vador, Polytech, Realities 4 Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Steven, Touls Devlin, and Willie, these guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Linux Mint 21.1 would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All 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 sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.