 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to be taking a look at Linux Mint 20.1, which was just recently released. Now, if you've watched the channel at all or listened to the podcast, you'll know that I'm a paperponer of Linux Mint Sucks. I'm the team leader, if you will. I'm not a big fan of Linux Mint. I have many problems. I will link the video I did where it literally says Linux Mint Sucks in the title, I think. Or maybe I think, actually I think I said Linux Mint is useless. But we're going to look at 20.1 today. We'll see if it changes my mind at all. I'm still pretty sure that I'll prefer the W in addition of Linux Mint. But we'll see. So let's just go ahead and jump over to the live CD. And this is the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. And it is, it looks like Linux Mint. So no beginning dialogues to start with. So you'll have to, if you're installing this, click the Install Linux Mint dialogue here. And then this is the standard, what appears to be, what is the Ubuntu installer called? Is that called the, I can't remember what it's called. It doesn't matter. Anyways, this is the Ubuntu installer. So English is the right one. English US US. Make sure that the keyboard is actually working. Because this is a virtual machine. Sometimes it doesn't work. Continue. Install multiple media codecs. Sure. No option for updates here at the beginning. That's a that's so smart. Actually, Bravo Linux Mint. Yes. Ubuntu always offers you to do do system updates in the installer. And that takes longer to actually install the system. And then you get to your first boot up and ask you to do more updates. It really makes no sense. It should just do all at once. After the install, it makes so much more sense. So this is, this is good. I just said something good about Linux Mint. Shocking. Okay, let's see here. Erase the disinstall Linux Mint. Yep. So that's just to do encryption. We'll just keep that as none. Interestingly, they're, interestingly, there's not one here for, was it ZFS? Is that, is that a thing? I know this is on Ubuntu, but apparently not on Linux Mint. Okay. I guess it doesn't matter. We're just going to go ahead and do the standard erasing install. It looks like it's going to do just the normal stuff here. Continue. It doesn't select the, let's pause a minute and do a little bit of a rant. This screen right here is the most dumb screen in all of Linux installations. And this is every installation is not just Linux Mint. This thing is dumb. Why is there even a map? Why don't it just give us a list? We don't need a map. I mean, these things are so hard to click on. I mean, like I'm supposed to be able to click it. See, I clicked in Detroit and it still says New York. Like now we finally get to Detroit, but that put us in Minneapolis. It's so weird. It's so bad. It's just, this is so terrible. Why can't I zoom in? I mean, it would make, it would make sense to have a map if you, you know, could zoom in and just strategically pick your location. And yes, I know, I know you can go through and, you know, just type in your city or whatever. But then why is there a map? It doesn't make any sense. It's so dumb. Maybe it's because once you type it in, it highlights it or something, I guess. I don't know. I suppose that's aesthetically pleasing. Maybe that's the reason why there's still a map, but otherwise this is still the stupidest thing in all of Linux. End rant. Continue. All right. Okay, so user selection is done in the installation, unlike the last couple that I've looked at where it was done afterwards. So let's see here. My name is Matt. And I'm going to be calling this mint VV and Dr. M dub. That is my chosen username. Okay, we'll leave this as it is and continue. And we'll see how long this takes. I probably won't cut out because a lot of the YouTubers would do this cut, you know, cut away from this because nobody wants to really watch this part of the thing. But this will actually give you an actual sense of how it, how long it takes. He said, let me just tell you, hey, oh, well, this took eight minutes. This way you get to sit here and watch me for eight minutes talking about nonsense. Let me look at the some design here. This is still the same minty design as always. So there's nothing really new here that I see in terms of design. We'll look a little bit more on that once we actually get into the thing. Okay, move that one fast. Wallpaper. That's kind of ugly. I'm just saying that's not a very good wallpaper. Black and white. Something colorful mint. I mean, why not at least make the Linux Mint logo here green and add some color? Very weird. And it's also weird that they list Netflix as a featured software and services kind of thing. Like that's not really a feature that you should be promoting. I mean, every distro can watch Netflix. And that's not even a feature of Linux Mint. That's a feature of Firefox. Firefox can watch Netflix. Congratulations, you're promoting something from Firefox. Like, same thing with YouTube. Is there a distro out there that can't play YouTube videos? And again, that's a feature of the browser not necessarily feature of the of the thing. Spotify and really box. Oh, here we go. That was done. All right. Let's go ahead and hit restart now. And it's going to ask me to I'm going to go ahead and shut this down. And so I can remove the the installation media. Storage, do do do. Oh, I removed it automatically. Cool. I've never seen that before. Cool. Cancel. Go ahead and restart. We'll start this back up. Go back full screen. Cool. That was, I've never, like I said, I've never had a distro do that before. Maybe I did something different. Okay, so like Ubuntu has the starting logo right from the beginning. That's nice. Interesting. All right. Weird startup sound. I don't know if you caught that or not. I'm not sure if I actually have the audio to play through for that. Actually, seeing as how you're going to get the audacity recording, you probably won't hear that. But there's a little lick ding dong that plays every time you log in. Kind of remind you remember the old Windows XP, like startup sound, kind of like that. All right. So welcome to Linux Mint. Show this dialog. Start up. We don't need to do that. Interestingly, there's not like a next button here. So this isn't actually like a step by step wizard. You can go away. You can also go away. So you have to actually click on these desktop cut callers. Oh, cool. All right. So we want to like purple and turn on dark mode. Yes. Dark mode is awesome. Panel layout. Modern or traditional. We'll stay with modern system. That's going to be using something like time lapse. That's always been a kind of a neat feature of Linux Mint that they have time lapse built in, but it's not a unique feature anymore. Very critical as usual device manager. Is this basically the standard Ubuntu device manager can't tell. Okay. Update manager. Is that okay? New version of update manager is available. I'm not going to install any updates. We don't need to do that. Interestingly, that stuff all seemed to be very custom to Linux Mint. I didn't know that they did that. I just figured that they used the standard Ubuntu stuff. That's cool. We'll go ahead and look at the system settings here in a minute. That looks familiar. Yes or no. That looks like the elementary OS settings panel. It also looks a little bit like the XFC settings panel that I think about it. I mean, I guess there's not many ways you can do settings panels, but it looks like the Mac OS settings panel that elementary OS ripped off. But hey, if it works, it works. Software manager. We'll look at that here in a second as well. Man, that's just standard GNOME software. Come on, Linux Mint. I mean, even Mate has their own little software boutique thing, which is awesome. This is just kind of reiterating my mind that why does this exist? It's just Ubuntu. I see firewall. Okay. Documentation, help, and contribute. Okay. Interestingly, no telemetry data collection option, which is good. So if you're kind of against Ubuntu's telemetry thing, then you won't have to worry about that on Linux Mint. Now, layout wise, first thing is I really did like that it put the theming right there in the welcome app. That's very cool. That's not something that a lot of distros do. I know Deepin did. And this is the second one that's kind of done that. So that welcome app was very well put together and it was simplistic, but it was good. I'm still having a hard time with GNOME software. I mean, I understand why put effort into something that you when you can just use this. I mean, I guess that's a good point, but I don't know. I just, I guess I hate GNOME software. It's better than discovery, but then that's not really saying all that much. Anyway, so this is just the, this is going to this is going to install from the standard repos, not from snaps, but it does have flat pack. It looks like it has flat pack available and built in. Cool. That's, so this uses, that's one area, I guess you could say that Linux Mint is differentiating itself from Ubuntu is that it's deviating away from snaps and going towards flat pack. I'm not sure if it's a better choice because flat packs has just as many, you know, weird things that going on about it as snap does, but it's also completely open source as far as I know. I'm not actually sure. I don't actually use flat pack all that much, but it's also controlled by a company. So it's developed by Red Hat. So, but then something that's being really kind of has to be supported by a company. So you really can't go and say, just because this is not a community software project, I'm going to not use it. Hardly have anything to use if that was your thing. So that's going on software basically settings application themes. This hasn't changed from since the last time I used cinnamon. And this is, this is Nemo, right? Okay. So Nemo is basically, if I'm not mistaken, Nemo is like a fork of Thunar. Maybe a fork of Kaja. I can't actually remember. Kaja or whatever it's called. It's a, it's an okay file manager. A lot of wasted space. I don't really care for the wasted space up here, but that's just, that's just me. Can you, can you hide the, you can hide the menu bar. Nemo's menu bar is how hidden, hidden. You have chosen you can tap it by the alt key. This right here is spectacular. I love this. I mean, this, it just, it seems like a really weird thing, but this small touch makes a ton of difference because like in Thunar, if you hide the, the menu bar, you can't get it back. As far as I know, even hitting the alt key, especially in like a window manager where you want to kind of hide that menu bar. And a lot of times you have the alt key bound to other things. This is a huge deal. You can also right click the empty region of the main menu bar. Okay. Okay. That is awesome. That is very good. In fact, I may be uninstalling Thunar and using Nemo for now on, on my desktop because just for that one feature and the fact that they warn you and tell you how to do it, that's awesome. That's really good. Link's meant you've changed my mind. And that's silly, but I mean, that's just really good. First of all, purple and black, great color scheme. Even though it's a color scheme of Northwestern University, and I'm a Spartan fan, still good color scheme. So that was Nemo. This is just going to be standard. You know, I'm terminal. I bet you. Yep. You know, I'm terminal. Nothing special there. But I mean, what were you really expecting? This is just Firefox. And again, Link's meant I don't want your crappy homepage. Stop setting the homepage. Link's meant that's just spooky. I want you to do that. It's not hard to change, but it's just, all right. So let's look at, okay, got it. So I just scroll all the way down here to find the changes for Ubuntu or Linux Mint, Cinnamon. Here we go. Change log new features. This feature contains many new improvements. Let's see here. Are you going to tell me the improvements? No. No, no, you're not going to. All right. So literally that's the release announcement. It says Linux Mint. Oh, we got to visit this. So it's not even, that's really weird. They want you to talk about link backs. Okay. Web apps. So maybe earlier when I was complaining about Netflix and YouTube, there's actually a reason for this. Why would you web apps? Link's mentioned, can you turn any website into a desktop application? Launch the web app manager and create a web app. So that's just web app. Okay. So make a new one. YouTube. YouTube.com. Let's try a more obscure one. Like, let's just try, I mean Reddit is not obscure, but did Reddit. I'm curious. I'm going to go and tell the stumps me. All right. So I'm a fan fiction guy. Did we stump it? Did we stump it? We stumped it. Hmm. Yeah. Well, what did you expect? It's not going to find the favorite con. Interesting. Okay. Well, it doesn't matter. It'll work. Browser, Firefox. Navigation bar. I don't think we knew that. Okay. Launch. And that is, I mean, why though? I'm trying to fit. I mean, the only thing you can pin it down here to the panel, which is cool. But I mean, how many websites are you going to, I mean, I could see it for like Netflix or, you know, Hulu or, you know, those kind of things or maybe Gmail could be useful, I guess, or Office online apps like, you know, Microsoft Office or Google Docs. Yeah, that's kind of a neat feature. I'm wondering what that actually is. So is there like an about here? Yeah. So this is just Linux kind of thing. Let's look at this thing. Web app manager. So you could use this with other distributions as well. That's really cool. So if I open this up and click the alt key, so you can actually use your Firefox extensions. And then you can reach add-ons by from the tool menu. Cool. It might actually be, you know, because like if each one is containerized, it might actually run things a little bit faster because you're not having, you know, I could have the ad blocker on this one running, but maybe it doesn't work. I don't have to have it on a website like, you know, OMG a boon to because I don't want to support those guys. You know, so that would that's a that's very neat. We can close that out. That's really quite good. Okay, so that was web apps. That's, that's really neat. Yeah. Hypnotics isn't another application, which is new in the next minute. It's a IP, IPTV player for M3 you play playlists. What even is that? So we gotta look at that. Hypnotics. Okay, so TV channels. USA. What the hell? So I can like watch TV on this? There's no way this works. Maybe see it using live events. I'll be right back after this commercial break. Let's close this if I see if we can find something else to watch. I mean, you guys wanted to watch some TV with me. Why isn't this closing? So say we wanted to change the channel. What else you got here? These are all like, wait, no way, like the actual weather channel, like the weather channel is a cable company, a cable TV, that's actually the weather freaking channel. What the hell? Why do I feel like I'm pirating something right now? All right, yeah, we got to close that before we get demonetized. But still, that is crazy. What is what even is that? Why is that? Why are they putting their development? I mean, that's really cool. But I kind of download it from my distro. But I don't know that it isn't necessarily something that needs to be installed right away. Favorites time and again, time again, we access to the same file. So you can favor things in Nemo, which is something that not unless has been able to do for quite a while. You can also find your favorites in the start menu, which is cool. Um, what else is this zoom in here? Sorry about that. I should have zoomed in earlier. Better flat pack support percentage in the sound system OCD. I don't know what that is. The option to always show the panel when the menu is open. That wasn't an option before. Like the panel disappeared. That's confusing. Uh, scrolling to the window quick list app, but some of these things I don't mean ZS ZST, the ZST support for Nemo file roller. That's gonna be something in the back back and thumbnail files up to 64 gigabytes in Nemo. There's interesting. Okay. Printing and scanning improvements, blah, blah, blah, XSAP improvements. These are gonna be mostly this is most of the stuff in the background. Chromium was added to the repository. So because it used to be the only way to get Chromium was through a snap package or building the debt the debt package. This is not in the in the standard repository for men, which is good. That means they're maintaining it and not Ubuntu. What is what does that mean unified file system layout? User merge makes sense for compatibility reasons. And other distributions have finished work on getting rid of the separation between bin and user bin as well as S bin and user S bin, Lib, user Lib. They're combining all this stuff. Interesting. Okay. So that's very technical. Not something most people, you know, be interested. Okay. This is still the settings panel. That's basically what it let's, uh, before we just sign out here, let's take a look and see what let's see you name dash A. This is using 5.4. That is an old LTS. Now the new links Linux kernel LTS version is 5.10. But it was just recently released so I can see why it's not. Um, this is neo fetch. So it's again, it's showing the 5.4 kernel batch 5.0.17. And I'm not sure what Ubuntu this is actually based on because the the newer this has to be based off the last LTS. It must be based off the last LTS. It has to be okay. So that makes sense. All right. So final thoughts on Linux mint 20.1. First of all, cinnamon's kind of cool. If you're coming from Windows, that's, they've changed my mind a bit. That's, that was a very good experience. Some of the new application, that web app thing is really, really cool. I'm not exactly sure that I would use it because I can just use a browser, but it's cool. For people who need software that's not available on Linux, that's kind of neat. The hypnotics things or whatever it's called for TV channels. What the hell is that thing? I mean, what is that thing? It's, I mean, it's simultaneously cool and head scratching. I mean, I literally scratched my head. Like I'm not sure of all the things to put development resources towards. They put in something an IPTV player. And first of all, how'd they get some of those channels? Like I didn't even know you could stream weather, the weather channel for free. The things you know, I'm going to have to open up the off stream because I don't, because I don't want to get to my eyes. I'm really interested to see what else, you know, it's interesting. Okay. Overall, it's still a good thing. I'm just more interested in the Debian edition. That's just me personally. But if you're coming from, you know, Windows, this is a good distro to start with. It's probably going to be very, very stable because the 5.4 kernel has been around for ages and ages is very steady. It's what Debian uses. So you're not going to change anything from there. And some of the just the little touches actually make this a really good nice thing to use. For me personally, no, of course not. I mean, I'm going to continue to use Arch, because I'm an Arch guy, but excuse me. That was, you know, I really enjoyed that little excursion into Linux Mint. And maybe Linux Mint isn't so useless. I still want the Debian edition to be their focus. And stop messing around with IPTV players because what the fuck? It's so weird. I mean, if you just want to do that as a side project, but it looks like something they've actually actively developed because they wanted to be part of Linux Mint, it's just really weird. Okay, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't give it a thumbs down. If you'd like to watch more Linux and floss content, we've have several of those linked below and here and all over the place. You can also subscribe because we post videos five to seven times a week. Some of those are tutorials and some of them are rants. One of them is a podcast which we do every Sunday called the Linux cast. It's the name of the channel. And I promise you it's much better than the solo pieces of crap that I post. And because I mean, everything is better with friends. So if you're a friend, you can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast. We appreciate every way you support us. So whether it's the freeway or the paidway, whatever, we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.