 Linux Mint and I have a colorful history. I'm on the record of saying that I prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition, and I'm on the risk of saying that Cinnamon is one of my favorite desktops. I think it's a very good, new user-friendly desktop environment. So every time there's a brand new version of Linux Mint out there, I tend to take a look at it and see what the new features are because Linux Mint does tend to do a very good job of constantly iterating their distro so that it looks and feels fairly fresh. So today, we're gonna take a look at the brand new Linux Mint version 21.1. This was just released a couple days ago and we're gonna take a look at the new features. So let's go ahead and jump in. So their primary goal for this brand new version of Linux Mint was to give Linux Mint a fresh look and feel. And while most of the stuff you'll see is very much the same as it always has been, they've done a lot of work to polish it so that it looks very nice. So the first thing you'll notice when you boot into Linux Mint for the first time is a clean desktop. So they have removed all of the icons that used to be there except for the mounted drive. So in the B-roll you're seeing, you'll probably see a mounted drive. That's a SMB share. Other than that, the home directory and the desktop directory are gone. You no longer have to see those. Now obviously if you want them back, it's easy to add them. But for clean look and feel, there are no folders on the desktop by default other than any mounted drives you tend to have. And you'll sense a theme as we go through because the next thing you'll probably notice is that the accent colors that they offer you have changed quite a bit. So they've made them more vibrant feeling so that they are more colorful. They used to be a little bit more muted and now they've made them more vibrant. Because of this change, they've also changed the default icons so that the accent colors play a little bit less of a role in what the icons actually look like. You won't see this in the B-roll because I had already changed the icons by the time I started shooting, but they have changed the default icons, specifically the folder icons. One of the things that I like that they've done is that if you don't care for the new vibrant colors, they've kept the old ones around, they've just named them all legacy. So if you want to use one of the older colors, including the minty green that used to be default, you can still access that very easily in the appearance settings. They've also set a brand new default cursor. So in the B-roll, you'll see me playing around with the cursor, but the cursor is now a more of a KDE-like, called a Bibata Modern Classic cursor. I'm not really one to critique a cursor, but it looks fine to me. So it is a brand new cursor that they've chosen. I think they used to use Adwaita. I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that. Next, they've changed several sounds for the system, which you'll hear coming up next. I tried to keep the sounds in there. I'm hoping that they did. If not, this section will get cut out. So I'm going to play the sounds or the new sounds that were based on Material Design B2 right now. Finally, they added several new icon packs that are pre-installed. They installed Breeze, Papyrus, Numix, and Yaru. Those are all available to you by default if you don't like the Mint Y and Mint X and Mint Legacy themes that are installed. So those are the overall surface level changes that you'll notice in terms of look and feel, at least in terms of the general use of Linux Mint. Now we're going to move into some more application-specific changes. So the first up on the list is the Driver Manager. The Driver Manager has received many improvements. The Manager now runs in user mode, so you no longer need a password to launch it. It has a new redesigned offline mode, which I don't actually show you. I believe that actually what I'm going to end up showing you here in a moment is the change log for this specific feature, simply because there's a lot here that I can't show you because the laptop that I'm on didn't have any drivers available to it. So you're going to see a brand new offline page that will tell you if you're offline, therefore can't download it in drivers. One bit about the Driver Manager that is a little bit confusing if you don't actually pay attention is that there is a new screen that will detect if you have a USB storage drive attached to your computer. And basically what this is from what I can tell is that it will mount it as a software repository. So if it has drivers on it, you could use that storage media as a software repository, which is actually kind of cool. I'm not sure if that's new or just redesigned though, so it may have been there before. So that's the new Driver Manager or the changes to the Driver Manager. It looks like they're trying to make it so that it's easier to install drivers not only from the repositories that are already existing for Linux Mint, but from your own sources as well, which is actually really nice because drivers or driver installation is always a pain in the rear end on any distribution. Anytime a distro tries to make it easier is a good thing. So moving on to the next thing and that is moving on to the Update Manager. So if you don't pay attention, Linux Mint is a anti-snap distro. So even though it's based on Ubuntu, they do not use snap packages and they're vehemently anti-snap. These are my people I'm telling you. And I don't like snapping either. So we have that in common. So they have adopted Flatpacks and I believe that Flatpacks was a new addition or at least a better integrated addition in version 21, but now that we're at 21.1, Flatpack integration is moving ahead and finding itself more integrated into the system. So in the Update Manager, now if you have Flatpacks installed and those Flatpacks have updates available, you can use the Update Manager to update your Flatpacks, which is again, very nice. It kind of reminds me of Topgrade, which is something that I use as a terminal-based application and that will also update your Flatpacks. This here will update your Flatpacks along with any other software you have on your machine. So it's kind of like a one-stop shop for updating everything, which is nice. I'm not sure how well the B-Roll shows this because they didn't have any Flatpacks to update. So it may not show this, but it does have Flatpack integration now in the Software Manager or in the Update Manager, I should say that. In the Software Manager, which is basically the software store, they've also done a better job of integrating Flatpacks. So as you'll see in the B-Roll, they now have it so that if you can change between the user repositories and the Flatpack repositories for different pieces of software, they've also refreshed the user interface so it makes it easier to distinguish between packages that are Flatpacks and system packages. I didn't really notice a difference when it comes to what these actually look like, but because every single one that I tried and clicked on, they all had both versions available to them. They've also said in the release notes that new Flatpacks are added from Flathub automatically every morning. So apparently they have like a crown job that will go out and take a look and see if there are any new Flatpacks on Flathub and they'll add them directly into the Software Manager. Okay, so the next one is a really cool piece of integration into their File Manager, but it's also something that I completely failed at and is still kind of complex. So one of the things that you're supposed to do when you download a Linux ISO is you're supposed to verify it and use checksum in order to verify and make sure it's a really appropriate and official ISO. This is not something that I have ever really spent a lot of time doing. I think I've actually only done it one time when I first switched to Linux and I don't even remember if I was successful at that point. So it's not something that I hardly ever do and I don't know if anybody else even does it. So it is something that you're supposed to do. It's supposed to be one of those best practices that you're supposed to do, it's always been kind of a weird process that's very terminal based, but Linux Mint has gone and tried to integrate and make better the process of verifying updates. So now if you download an ISO and you'll see this in the B roll, if you download an ISO, you can right click on it in the File Manager and there's a new option that says verify. So you'll be able to verify that ISO. Now I got to this point perfectly fine and as you'll hopefully see in the B roll, I completely failed after this because you have to get the GPG key and you have to get the check sum, right? And you have to put them in the appropriate places which is not, they have different ways you can get these things. You can get it directly from a URL which I totally messed up to begin with because I didn't read. And then, or you can put it, you can download those files and then point the verify tool to those files on your system. So I did that, I couldn't get to verify. I did finally get it to try to verify and it didn't work. I'm not sure if I was getting the wrong files or what, it didn't really matter. I'm 100% positive that I was just doing it wrong. So there's nothing wrong with the tool. I'm just an idiot. So the of that portion there didn't work for me but it probably would work for you if you know what you're doing. So one thing I will say is that at least so far, the tool doesn't have a ton of like say, hey, do this and this is how this works. Now supposedly if you're downloading something that's based on Ubuntu, the GPG and the check sum files will fill themselves in automatically. I'm not sure if this works. I tried it with a Fedora ISO in it that didn't work but it was not supposed to work with Fedora. It's supposed to only work with Ubuntu and things based on Ubuntu. So if you are using this to verify in Ubuntu ISO or something based on Ubuntu, the hardest part should be done for you which is again, very, very well done if it works. So verifying ISOs is another area where I mean, I've never seen this built into a distro before. It's an awesome idea because you're really supposed to verify every ISO that you download. Again, I don't do that. I should do it, but I don't do it. So now that they're building this in, that's a really good feature to have. In addition, now they have that verify feature in the image writer. So they have a USB image writer that's always been a part of Linux Mint. Now when you, or before you write that ISO to the USB key there's a verify button there that will bring up the verify tool so you can verify the ISO before you write it which is again, very nice. Now another thing with the image writer and I don't know if I showed this on B-roll or not, probably not, but they will now detect if the ISO that you're trying to burn is a Windows image and they will pop up a little screen that says this is an ISO that looks like a Windows image. Windows image requires, requires special processing. Now that's, I mean, it's great that they detect that it's a Windows image. I would love it if they actually then said, hey, here's how you would go about doing that. Now they have a link for more information but it's going to just link to another tool. I would prefer it if this tool just would actually burn a Windows image. That'd be awesome because burning a Windows image is always kind of a pain in the rear because you have to have a special tool to do it if they built that into this tool, that'd be kind of awesome, but it's not there. But they do detect it so that at least points you towards more information. So moving on to the last part of the update and some of the stuff we've already talked about but the version of Cinnamon has been increased to version 5.6 and this includes several fairly minor improvements to the user interface. So the first thing in version 5.6 that you'll notice at least in this version of Cinnamon is that the show desktop button has been removed. It's no longer there. It has actually been replaced with a little bar that appears right next to the clock on the right-hand side. It is very subtle. I'll go put it that way. Now if you've ever used Windows before, Windows does this exact same thing. There's a little bar along the right-hand side on the Windows taskbar that if you click on it, it will show the desktop. This is the same thing. It's not as, like I said, I think it's even more subtle than the Windows version because there's no like shading when you hover over it. It's just there. There is a tool tip that will pop up if you sit there for long enough, but it doesn't change color when you hover over it, which I wish it did. But other than that, if you want to show desktop, that's where you would do it. I think I probably prefer the button simply because it's not as subtle. It's like, obviously you could add the show desktop thing back if you wanted to. I'm assuming that's still part of the applets, but the bar just seems a little bit too subtle for me and it's kind of hard to hit because that button or that the click event space is just so really small. Okay, so Nemo itself, which is the file manager, has received a ton of different updates. So in the icon view, the selected files will now just highlight the name instead of the entire folder. They've done this to be more consistent with the other views that come with Nemo. They've changed the desktop icon to flip vertically so that the bars along the bottom instead of along the top, I believe. They've also added a shortcut on the actual desktop to show your display settings. So if you right click on the desktop, you'll get a link now that says display settings and it'll actually pop up the display settings so you can change resolution and things like that. Going back to the Nemo just for a moment, they have changed it so that the time and date stamps on in Nemo, if you're using the list view are now mono space fonts. And this drives me nuts, honestly. I looked at this and like, I can kind of understand why they did it so that the dates and stuff stand out, but I'm all for consistency. I don't want some fonts to be mono space and some fonts to be not mono space, especially when they're literally side by side. That kind of drives me nuts. It's just my OCD acting up, but it looks kind of funky to me, to be honest with you. In the also in Nemo, if you click on the path bar, it will lead you to the location entry so you can actually type in a path. And if you click back, it'll actually take you back to the path bar like it is normally. And then there are several smaller improvements to Cinnamon as well. So if you want to add a keyboard shortcut, there is now a search function for keyboard shortcuts, which is very useful because if you have a lot of keyboard shortcuts and you want to search for them, you can now do so. Preferred applications used to be one, like I think it used to be a dropdown to be honest with you. Now it is, or maybe I'm thinking of XFC. I'm not actually sure. All I know is they used to be all together. Now they've split out the featured applications into categories so that you can have a better idea of what you're changing, which is also nice. The inhibit applet was given key bindings to toggle power management and notifications. The themes in the theme settings panel have now been sorted from light and dark theme. They're no longer just mixed together, which is also, it looks more, it looks better, I should say, I guess is the way I should say it. They've also separated the legacy themes out as well. The system infrastructure now shows the operating system logo. So if you are using Linux Mint, obviously, you're going to get the Linux Mint logo, which is nice. I believe if you're using Cinnamon 5.6 on a different distro, it would show that logo. And finally, they've brought back window placement, which is a fantastic piece of options for you. If you use multiple monitors, window placement is a key setting because if you open up an application and it appears on the monitor or somewhere where your mouse is not in focus, it's always kind of a pain in the Tuckus because then you have to go over to that monitor, drag it back to where you want it to be. And then it's just, it's a waste of time. Now you can go into the settings and change it so that the window, any new window will swan either in the center or right under your mouse. This used to be a feature in Cinnamon. They took it out when they had to update Mudder for some reason. And now it's back, which is also really nice. So there are actually a few other smaller improvements that I didn't show on camera. So the way you interact with packages that you wanna remove has significantly changed. So if you're removing a flat pack, you no longer have to enter a password, which is really nice. The Synaptic and Update Manager will now also ask a PK exec to remember your password. So if you are constantly removing stuff, it'll remember the password. I believe there's a time limit on that. I'm not actually sure if that's true or not. It doesn't actually say. Also, if you are going to add PPAs to Linux Mint, some of that stuff has changed specifically in the Software Sources GUI, which manages the PPAs for you once you've added them. I'm not actually sure what's new here. All the change notes say is the following, the upstream depreciation of AppKey, the Software Sources received changes to rework the way it handles PPA keys. I'm not actually sure what the difference is there. I'm assuming it's just because something has gone away and they needed to change the way things work. So that is Linux Mint version 21.1. And it is a very nice little release. If you are a Linux Mint user, updating to this will get you some nice-looking feel and quality of life improvements. Nothing too huge, so you're not gonna have to deal with a lot of changes, but some brighter colors, some better icons, a more cleaner-looking feel across the board. Again, that is Linux Mint 21.1. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on MassiveThunder Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Links for Liberapay and the YouTube support system will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thanks very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all absolutely amazing people, so just thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.