 Are you a new Linux user or are you thinking about switching to Linux? Maybe you're thinking about leaving Windows or Mac and switching over to Linux. If you are, you've probably done a little bit of research. You vast around on the internet. Hey, what's the best Linux distribution for a beginner? Probably one of the most common answers to that question is Linux Mint. Linux Mint is a Linux distribution that many people begin with as far as a first Linux distribution to install. And it's great. It's perfect for beginners. It's very new user friendly, but when you go to Linux Mint, their website to download an edition of Linux Mint, they actually have three different editions as far as main desktop editions. They have the Cinnamon edition, they have the Mate edition, and they have the XFCE edition. And if you're brand new to Linux, you probably have no idea what those terms are. What's the difference between these three Linux Mint distributions? Which one should I choose as a brand new user? So today I'm going to cover the differences between the three main flavors of Linux Mint and which one is probably the best one for you to choose. So let's first take a look at Linux Mint Cinnamon, because Cinnamon really is kind of their flagship desktop environment. The Linux Mint team actually develops the Cinnamon desktop environment. It is probably what they spend most of their time on actually is developing this particular desktop environment. Now, if you're new to Linux, we should talk about what a desktop environment actually is. So when we talk about Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE, those are desktop environments. There's dozens of desktop environments available for you to use in Linux. A desktop environment, what that is, that is a bundle of components that makes up your desktop. So we're talking about the panel or the dock, and we're talking about the menu system. We're talking about the suite of applications that come bundled with the desktop environment. We're talking about everything you're seeing on the screen right now. This is your desktop environment. Another common term for this would be a graphical user interface. Sometimes you'll hear that term, a GUI GUI, and what we're talking about there is, again, the graphical user interface. It's what you're seeing. We're essentially talking about your desktop environment. Now, one of the really cool things that the Linux Mint team does is they really make Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE look very similar. Like, when you first log in to any of the three editions of Linux Mint, the workflow and the look and feel is almost exactly the same. When you log into Cinnamon, the very first thing you notice is you get a welcome screen. This is a little helper screen here where you can read documentation and figure out a little bit about Linux Mint and how to tweak it and things like that. You'll notice that you have this traditional Windows kind of workflow. As far as there's a panel at the bottom, you have the menu system at the far left. You can think of it as like the Windows start menu. If I switched over to the Mate desktop, this is the Mate desktop when you first log in. Once again, you get the Linux Mint welcome screen here. You have a panel at the bottom. You have a menu system. It looks a little different. The menu system here in Mate compared to Cinnamon, but it's very traditional as far as Windows users would be very comfortable in both Mate and Cinnamon. If I switch over here to the XFCE edition of Linux Mint, you see it has that same kind of paradigm, that same look and feel. You have the welcome screen that first pops up. You have a panel at the bottom. You have your start menu, if you will, at the bottom left. Again, the menu system is a little different because, again, Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, they're different desktop environments. The panels are actually different programs. The menu system is a different program. The suite of applications, they're going to be differences between they're not all going to have the same text editor, for example, or the same terminal emulator, maybe not even the same audio player and video player and things like that. You'll have their own suite of applications that make up that particular desktop environment. Let me go back to this Cinnamon desktop environment. Let's talk about Cinnamon. What is Cinnamon? Well, it's a modern, innovative, full-featured desktop environment. It's very polished, very slick-looking. The downside to Cinnamon is that because it's more modern, it does require a little bit more system resources. It'll take up a little bit more CPU, a little bit more RAM to run. It's still much, much lighter than things like Windows and Mac. But for Linux desktop environments, Cinnamon is a little heavier. It's going to be the heaviest of the three. But if you've got any halfway-decent computer, Cinnamon will run just fine on it. If you've got something that's really old, maybe it's something that doesn't even have a multi-core CPU. Maybe you only have four gigs of RAM or even less. Maybe you have a hard drive rather than a SSD. You know, something kind of old, right? You've got a potato of a machine. Cinnamon is probably the worst of the desktop environments to put on a machine like that. But if you've got anything halfway-decent, Cinnamon will run just fine. Looking at some of the applications that come installed with Linux Mint Cinnamon, let's start with the web browser, because that's the application most computer users spend most of their time in, right? Everybody these days spends pretty much 99% of their time in a web browser. So let's talk about the web browser, because it's going to be the same in all three editions. It doesn't matter if it's Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE. The web browser is going to be Mozilla Firefox, which is free and open source software. It's one of the biggest pieces of free and open source software on the planet. And this is Firefox version 89.0.2. By the way, the version of Linux Mint that we are running, all three versions we're running today are version 20.2, which was just released just a few days ago. The file manager inside Linux Mint is a program called Nemo. It's a very slick looking file manager. It's one of the best file managers available. And file managers, we have dozens available on Linux, kind of like we have dozens of desktop environments. You can find alternatives to all the software on Linux. If you find a program that's just not working for you, chances are there's dozens of alternatives for that task. So if you don't like the text editor or the terminal or the file manager or your audio player, just open up the software center and find a replacement for it. We should talk about software. All three versions of Linux Mint are going to have a software center here. The software manager. So the software manager, for those of you that are used to other operating systems, think of it as your app store. And you just do a search. For example, if I wanted a video player, I could just start typing video player and let's just see what comes up for suggestions. And you see I get a whole bunch of suggestions. I could just read through this and pick one that sounds good and I can try it out. If I install something and I don't like it, you can always uninstall it too. So removing software is really, really easy in Linux. It's completely different than the way you did it in Windows where typically in Windows you go and find a random piece of software on somebody's website, download it. Hope it's not something malicious. Hope it's not full of viruses and things like that. You install it and hope it runs right. And then when you don't want it anymore, how do you get rid of it? Typically people don't uninstall things from Windows. They just leave stuff around. That's not the way it works on Linux. So remove all of your software and remove all of your software through a package manager such as the Software Center that I just showed you on the screen. Everything's managed through that and you never have to worry about if this package malicious because you're getting it from the Linux Mint team. They curate that software center so you don't have to worry if you're downloading something that all of a sudden is going to take over your machine and start mining Bitcoin unbeknownst to you. That doesn't really happen to us on Linux. I think that Cinnamon was the heaviest of these three desktop environments meaning it's the one that's going to require the most CPU, the most RAM. It's the one that's going to benefit the most from having things like a SSD rather than a spinning hard drive. Now that's not to say that Cinnamon again is slow and bloated or heavy. Compared to Windows, Cinnamon is blazing fast. Chances are if you're coming from Windows you wipe out Windows and install Linux Mint Cinnamon. You're going to be amazed at the speed improvements. It's just compared to the other desktop environments that Linux Mint has available. Cinnamon is probably the slowest of the three. So let me open up a terminal and I'll actually show you what I'm talking about here. So I'm going to open up this terminal. I'm going to make it a little bigger so you guys can read this. I'm going to run this program called H-Top. H-Top is not installed in Linux Mint by default. I installed it off camera. But what this does, it tells me is how much CPU and how much RAM I'm actually using. And I gave this virtual machine that I'm running Linux Mint in. I gave it four gigs of RAM and Cinnamon's taking up 736 megs. That's actually pretty good. Even though that's going to be heavier than the other two desktops I show, 736 megs of 4 gigs of RAM is actually very, very good. It's using a little CPU, about 4%, 5% of the CPU and we're not really doing much. So it is taxing the CPU just a little bit. So now I'm back in the Monte desktop environment and I'm going to once again open a terminal. I'll make it full screen and I'll zoom way in and I'll run the H-Top program here and you can see 4 gigs of RAM once again. But now we're only using 559 megs of RAM. So a couple of hundred megs of RAM less than Cinnamon. So Monte is a little lighter, also the CPU. It's not really being taxed at all. We're only using 102% of the CPU where we're using about 4% or 5% on Cinnamon. And finally let's switch over to the XFCE desktop environment and once again I'm going to open up a terminal make it full screen and I'll zoom in and we will run H-Top one more time and this time 4 gigs of RAM but we're only using 516 megs. So just slightly less than Monte. Actually Monte and XFCE are about the same. XFCE is a little lighter. No CPU really being used at all. So almost none. XFCE is the lightest of the three choices. So if you had something that was a little older, maybe your machine is I don't know, 8 years, 10 years old maybe 12 years old. XFCE is definitely the one I would suggest trying first. Let me switch back to the Monte edition earlier I talked about a little bit of the history of Cinnamon, how Cinnamon, the desktop environment, was actually created by the folks at Linux Mint. The Linux Mint team is also behind much of the development of the Monte desktop environment. That's why these two particular desktop environments are main editions of Linux Mint is because they actually help develop these desktop environments. Monte is an old fork of GNOME version 2. GNOME is another desktop environment available in Linux and there was a version of it, version 2 that was end of life about 10 years ago and people really loved that particular desktop environment so they forked the project, renamed it Monte and it kind of lives on today, the old GNOME 2 desktop environment as Monte. Now Monte is spelled M-A-T-E all caps, right? But it's actually an acronym, it's M-A-T-E and it's pronounced Monte the stress is on the first syllable and Monte is actually a recursive acronym. So in free software we love recursive acronyms. For example you guys probably have heard of GNU, GNU. What does GNU stand for? It stands for GNU's not UNIX so a recursive acronym is an acronym that actually refers to itself and that's what Monte is. Monte stands for the Monte traditional advanced environment so it refers to itself in the acronym. It's kind of a nerdy thing that people love to do with free and open source software to use these recursive acronyms. While we're at it we should actually talk about XFCE. What does XFCE stand for? What is its history? XFCE is a very old desktop environment that started more than 20 years ago and XFCE originally stood for the X-Forms common environment and it was spelled all caps XFCE because it was an acronym. But the XFCE has been rewritten a couple of times and it no longer uses the X-Forms toolkit. It is a GTK based desktop environment just like Cinnamon, just like Monte so it didn't make sense for them to rename it to something different. They kept the name XFCE but what they did is they dropped the spelling as far as the capitalization. Now only the X is capitalized and it really doesn't stand for anything anymore. They just kept the name just because that's always been the name. Now getting back to which edition of Linux Mint you should choose if you're brand new to Linux, you're just coming over and you've decided to use Linux Mint as your first Linux distribution. Well I would start with the Cinnamon desktop environment if you have any kind of modern machine that's got a reasonable amount of RAM, say more than 4 gigs. But most machines now I don't think you can even buy machines anymore that have less than 8 gigs so you're probably good on the Cinnamon desktop environment and it looks good. It's the most modern. It's the one that the Linux Mint team spends the most time working on and it's the one they recommend people try first and that's the one I recommend people try first. If you're coming from Windows especially you're going to feel right at home in the Cinnamon desktop environment. Now if you've got an older machine what I would suggest is trying the Mate desktop instead of the Cinnamon desktop. Mate a little easier on CPU usage, RAM usage and it looks good. It's very fast, very pippy and it will really bring older equipment back to life. Machines that they stand no chance of running Windows 10 or certainly not the upcoming Windows 11 that's going to have even more system requirements. Mate will bring those laptops back to life. And if you're a complete speed freak then I would strongly suggest XFCE. It's going to be the fastest and the lightest desktop environment available on Linux Mint and it looks good and maybe it has an older kind of retro look to it because again this desktop environment has been around for a while. It still sees updates and people are still working on it but it does have a little bit of that kind of retro that vintage look to it but if you're trying to get the most speed, the most bang for your buck as far as resource usage XFCE is definitely the way to go. And other than performance and how it works with your hardware the other big thing is just personal preference. You know which one do you like more, which one do you enjoy using more and of course the only way you're going to know that is to actually try out all three and that's very easy to do so what I would suggest start with a Cinnamon desktop you know go download the Cinnamon ISO from the Linux Mint website and burn it to a USB stick and then plug it into your computer and reboot and you will boot into a live version of Linux Mint Cinnamon and just play around with it for a little bit see if you like it. If you like it, maybe that's the one to install. You know if you play around with it and you're not liking it it doesn't seem like it's going to be that great for you it's not going to work for you then go download the Mate ISO Burn that to the USB stick and try that out in a live environment. If that's not working for you try the XFCE or just try all three anyway just to see which one you prefer. Another thing you can do is actually install these inside a virtual machine so VirtualBox is a very popular virtual machine program it's available on Windows, Mac and Linux so if you're on Windows you can install VirtualBox on Windows and then inside that you can install Linux Mint Cinnamon for example and it doesn't affect your hard drives or anything it's perfectly safe but it allows you to test drive some of these other operating systems without ever touching your Windows installation. So try all three out because largely it's a matter of taste which one you prefer and maybe you don't prefer any of these maybe you want to try out another Linux distribution all together. Ultimately the right Linux for you is the one where you feel right at home Now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank James Mitchell Paul West, Akami Allen Chuck Kurt, David Dillon, Gregory Irion, Alexander Peace Arch and Fedora, Polytech Raver, Scott Steven and Willie. These guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible this show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors it's just me and you guys the community if you like what I do and want to support my work look for DistroTube over on Patreon alright guys peace they don't have an open box edition