 One of the more popular desktop Linux distributions out there is Linux Mint, and Linux Mint just had a huge release. They just released version 20, codenamed Uliana, and today I thought I would take a quick first look at Linux Mint 20, their Cinnamon Edition, inside of VM. Going to the web browser here and reading the release announcement, Linux Mint 20 is a long term support release, which means you get 5 years of support, so you can run Linux Mint 20 until the year 2025, which makes sense because Linux Mint 20 is based off of Ubuntu 2004 LTS, which has 5 years of support. It also has some system requirement information here in the release announcement, you need a minimum of 1GB RAM, they say 2GB though is really recommended for comfortable usage, and I would agree with that the Cinnamon desktop environment is a little heavy, 2GB is probably the minimum, really 4GB is probably where you want to be at, but most people these days probably have at least 4GB of RAM. You need 15GB of disk space, although they say 20GB is recommended. Also some of the new stuff in this particular edition of Linux Mint include this new application called Warpinator, which looks like it is for using things like SSH, FTP, Samba Shares, pretty cool application, I don't know if I'll take a look at it when I get into the VM or not. We have NVIDIA Optimus support, also we have some improvements to the system tray, it looks like the system tray now has the ability to handle mouse wheel scrolling events. We will be running Cinnamon 4.6 as our desktop environment, Cinnamon 4.6 will introduce fractional scaling for those that need it. Also the GDB tool has received a new user interface for those that are not familiar with GDB, that is a tool used to install dev packages, like if you go grab a third party dev pack for something like Skype, then you need to use a tool like GDB if you want a graphical way of installing that dev pack. So let me spin up a quick VM here, and I am going to install Linux Mint here inside a virtual machine. I gave this VM 4GB of RAM, 2 cores of my 24 thread thread ripper, and I gave this VM 25GB of disk space because they recommended 20, I bumped it up to 25, just to make sure we had plenty of disk space for the installation. So when you first launch Linux Mint off the ISO, you have this boot menu and I'm going to choose start Linux Mint, so let's go ahead and get directly into the live environment. And now we are in the live environment, I really don't want to play around in the live environment, I want to run through the installation. If you've ever seen an install of Ubuntu or any Ubuntu based distribution, they're pretty much all the same. So you guys are, I'm sure, familiar with the Ubiquiti installer, it's dead simple to use. So even if you've never installed Linux ever, as long as you can click OK three or four times, you can actually get through a Linux install. So by default it's already chosen English as my language, I don't need to change that, so I just need to click continue. This US has been chosen for the keyboard, that's fine for me. If you want to change it to something else you can, there's also a test field where you can test for special characters if you're changing to something else other than your standard English keyboard. I'm just going to click continue here. Do we want to install multimedia codecs? Yes, you're going to need that to get a good desktop experience, so that's going to give you everything needed for playing all of your multimedia, your audio and video formats. In the installation type, by default it's going to erase the disk and install Linux Mint to that disk. If you wanted to do something else you could choose something else and go through manual partitioning of Linux Mint if you wanted to do that. For me I'm just going to erase the disk and let Linux Mint have the whole 25 gig virtual hard drive I created, so I'm going to click install. Now it's going to warn me that it's about to format that virtual hard drive and write to the disk. I'm going to click continue. Then it's going to ask about the time zone and it's correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, so all I need to do is click continue. Then I need to create my username and password. My username will be DT. And then I need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user for privacy reasons, then confirm that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically? No, I created a strong and complicated password to have to enter a password. So I want to make sure I have this ticked on, require my password to log in. Then click continue. And the installation will continue. Typically these installs take five to ten minutes. I will be back once the installation has completed. And the installation has completed. That just took a few minutes. And now to actually complete the installation, what you need to do is click restart now and that's what I'm going to do. It's going to ask us to remove the installation medium. So if you're doing this on physical hardware, what this means is you need to unplug the USB key that you were installing from. In my case, I just needed to detach the ISO from the VM. Now let me log in. And when we first log in, we are welcomed with this greeter. We have this welcome greeter that goes over some of the first steps that you may want to take when you first install Linux Mint. So customizing things like the colors, the desktop colors, just the panel layout, going ahead and setting up your system snapshots. So that would be using a tool like Timeshift to take snapshots of your system. Just in case your system ever breaks, you can restore it to a previous working state. We can also launch our driver manager. That is where you would install your drivers for your graphics drivers, Wi-Fi drivers and things like that. And we also can go ahead and update the system right here. We click launch for the update manager and click OK. And it should go out and sync the repositories and let us know if there are any updates available. There are. There's 56 updates available. So this was just released yesterday, but already there is some updates that are available. Of course, we have to give the update manager root privileges to do the update. Anytime you install or remove software in Linux, you have to give a root password and you have to have root privileges to do so. It's taking a minute to download everything. And now it's installing the packages that it has downloaded. If I click details, I actually get some terminal output here. It's basically like running the command in the terminal. It shows you what you would see had we run this command in the terminal. If I click details again, all that output goes away. And that update has finished. It's asking me to reboot after that update because that update included a new kernel. But for now, I am just going to close that out. I will reboot after the video here. Other than that, we could go ahead and launch our system settings. This is your basically your control panel here. We will come back to this later. We also can view our software manager. This is basically your app store where you can go and take a look at programs to install such as while they give you some editors pick wine, which is a Windows emulator sublime, which is proprietary. It is a IDE, basically a text editor, YMP, which is a fantastic free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop Blender, which is another fantastic program. Of course, virtual box for running virtual machines, et cetera. I do notice since they have some proprietary software in here like sublime and Skype, I'm assuming that the software center here is pulling down maybe flat packs. I don't know. Let me try to install sublime. And does it actually tell me what kind of package it is? Because I know sublime is not going to be like in the Ubuntu repositories or anything. I don't know. I would have to probably be using a flat pack or a PPA to install this. I install it. Just want to install it and see what kind of package this would be. So that is finished installing. Let me pull up a terminal really quick. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to run the command flat pack space list. It should list any flat packs that we've installed on the system. And nothing was returned. I just get another empty prompt. So it did not install sublime as a flat pack. I'm assuming then it installed it from a PPA because sublime being proprietary software is not open source software. It won't be in like your standard Ubuntu repositories. Getting back to the welcome greeter and one other thing you could do, you could go ahead and enable and configure your firewall. And I'm assuming they're probably using UFW, which is the uncomplicated firewall that ships by default with Ubuntu. So that's probably what the Mint guys are using. And that is what they're using. This is GUFW. This is the GUI front end to UFW. But if you wanted to, you could just turn the firewall on by sliding that over. You could set up some rules for it if you wanted to. Go to the rules tab and hit plus. And then set up whatever rules you needed to set up. I'm going to go ahead and close all of that out. I'm going to go ahead and tick off this box here. It says show this dialogue at startup. I never want to see this welcome screen again after going through everything one time. You really don't need this to auto start every time you log into Linux Mint. So I'm going to tick that box off and then close the window. And I'm just going to very briefly go over what is installed by default here on Linux Mint Cinnamon. So under accessories, we have our archive manager that is for zip, unzip, and things like that. Now that is where you can extract archived packages. We have our calculator. We have our character map. We have our disks tool. We have the document viewer. We have our file manager. The file manager, of course, is going to be Nemo. That is the file manager within the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is Nemo 4.6.4. Nemo has a reputation of being one of the best graphical file managers available on Linux. A lot of people use Nemo outside of the Cinnamon desktop. For example, I know a lot of people will install Nemo for use in GNOME or in Budgie, other GTK based desktops. And getting back to the menu, under accessories, we also had our font tool. We have Gnode. Gnode, I'm assuming, is just going to be your standard note-taking application. And if I close it out, I don't think it puts anything in the system tray or anything. No, it went away. All right, under accessories, we also have our image viewer on board, which is our on-screen keyboard. So that would be for anybody that needs that for accessibility reasons. We have our password and key tool. We have Redshift. Redshift is useful for changing the color temperature of your displays. And that is useful as the daylight changes from day to night outside. Sometimes you want your monitor to change color temperature as well. It's easier on the eyes. And it's supposed to be healthier for you, for your sleep patterns. Now, nothing happened when I launched Redshift. Nothing appeared on the screen here. It's because Redshift is a system tray application. So let me move my head out of the way. And this right here is Redshift. This one right here, it says, color temperature is 6,500 kelvins, and the period is daytime. If I right-click on it, I can enable it or disable it. I can suspend it. I can have it auto-start or not auto-start. And of course, I can quit the application altogether. Nothing back in the menu system and under accessories. We also had our screenshot utility. We had our text editor. And the text editor for the Cinnamon desktop environment is a text editor called Zed. X-E-D-Zed is very similar to G-Edit. It can use a lot of the G-Edit plugins. I actually covered how to customize Zed a little bit in a video about a month back. I did a video on going from noob to power user in Linux Mint. If you haven't checked that video out, check it out, it would provide you some really interesting ways to customize Linux Mint, maybe some ways to customize Linux Mint that you haven't thought about before. Also under accessories, we have our USB image writer and our stick formatter. We have a virtual keyboard and we have the Warpinator program that they mentioned in the release announcement. And again, this is for doing anything across a shared network. So if you're doing things with SSH, FTP, SFTP, things like that, this is the tool for that. It says no other computer is found because I'm not on a network here. So we really can't do anything with that tool. Under graphics, we have our document scanner. We have drawing and we have a program called PIX. Let me open up PIX. I'm not sure what PIX is. If I go to the about, it says PIX 2.4.11 and image viewer and browser. All right, well, I don't have any images really to check out here, but it looks like it is an interesting application. Under internet, we have our default web browser, which of course is Firefox and let me launch Firefox. Take a second to load. And if I go to the menu here and I go to help, I go to about Firefox. This is the latest Firefox 77.0.164 bit and by default it takes us to the linuxmint.com site and you do have a custom Google search engine that you could use here on the linuxmint website and that gives linuxmint a little revenue if you use that. Also under the internet category, we have hex chat, which is an IRC chat client and it looks like by default, it is gonna go ahead and log in to the linuxmint channel. Yeah, it does. It logs into the hashtag linuxmint-help, which is over on the free node network, I believe, and that would get you support if you needed it for your linuxmint installation. That's a really nice touch that I wish more linux distributions did is have a IRC client already on the system and have it automatically connect to a support channel because that's what people typically are gonna want it for anyway. Under internet, we also have Thunderbird as our email client and we have transmission as our BitTorrent client. Under office, we have most of the LibreOffice suite or maybe all of it, we have our LibreOffice base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. If I open up LibreOfficeWriter, let's check what version they are on. Click okay there. I'm gonna go to about LibreOffice. This is LibreOffice6.4.3.2. Not the most recent version of LibreOffice, but fairly recent. And just checking on my arch-based host machine here, LibreOfficeWriter is on 6.4.4.2 for me. So again, it's not the absolute latest, but pretty recent release of the LibreOffice suite. Under programming, we have SublimeTex, which I installed. This was not installed by default. Again, it's proprietary software. It's not something I would use anyway. I was just installing this to actually test it out and then to see exactly where that was coming from. Under sound and video, we have Celluloid, which is our video player, I believe. Let's go to the about Celluloid here. Celluloid 0.19. This is a GTK front end for MPV. So MPV is a minimal movie player, basically. And Celluloid is a GTK front end to that. Sound and video, we also have Rhythmbox, which is a fantastic music player, fully featured music player. It's one of the standard GNOME apps. This is Rhythmbox3.4.4. And typically, if a Linux distribution ships with Rhythmbox by default, I don't rush to uninstall it. It's a pretty fantastic program. Back to the menu, we have administration. And this is where we get things like our backup tool, which I believe is going to be DejaDoup or is this a timeshift? I believe this is the DejaDoup tool. Let's see. If I click backup now, it's gonna ask me where to backup forward, document.backups, forward again. I really probably shouldn't run it back up here in the VM, but we just successfully ran the backup tool there. And let's get back into administration. We have our disk usage analyzer, the driver manager, and that's where you would go get your third-party drivers that you need. We have a login window, our logs, power stats, printers. That's for, of course, getting your printer drivers and things like that. We have our software sources. Let me check that out. And it's gonna need a root password. And let's see what PPAs are installed. There are no PPAs installed. So I'm wondering where they got Sublime. If I look at additional repositories, a CD-ROM installation disk, maybe they already had Sublime. No, because I installed Sublime after running through, after detaching the ISO. Official repositories, let's see. Packages.linuxmint.com, archive.aboon2.com, slashaboon2. Yeah, I'm still not sure where the Sublime package is coming from. Also under administration, we have the Synaptic Package Manager. So this is a really nice graphical way of installing and removing software. It's not gonna have screenshots and things like that, user reviews, but it does allow a very nice interface to search for applications that you may want on the system. You just search for something. You click the search button and you search for a particular program. So if I wanted to install Emacs on Linux Mint, it could do a quick search and it looks like it's got a million things that are related to Emacs here. But if I search through the list, somewhere in this list, I will find Emacs. I will tick it on. I will mark it for installation. It's gonna tell me the bajillion things that it's gonna install as far as Emacs and all the dependencies. I click mark and then if I hit apply, it will run that installation. Now I don't really wanna install Emacs inside this VM so I will quit out of that. Also under administration, we have our system monitor. Let's check out the system monitor. Let's see what kind of system resources we are using. Now this of course is in a VM. So let's let this settle down for a little bit. We're using about 12 to 15% of the CPU. That's a little high, but again, this is in a VM. We're using about one gig of the four gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. That's kinda normal for Cinnamon actually. So nothing too out of whack there. That's pretty normal. Now if I wanted to check it out in Htop because typically I do these tests in Htop. So let me do a control alt T on the keyboard. Control alt T is a standard key binding in Ubuntu and a lot of other distributions as well. Control alt T typically brings up a terminal. And if I do control shift plus sign, it will zoom in. And now that I've got that zoomed in to where you can see if I run Htop, Htop is not on the system. So let's do a pseudo apt install Htop. Of course, you could go to your graphical software center to grab Htop, but obviously it's a lot quicker if you know what you're doing. Just to do it right here in the terminal. So I've installed Htop. I'm gonna run Htop. And let's see if we get the same kind of figures. Now the CPU usage is much lower. Checking it out here in Htop 2%. Yeah, that's pretty normal. RAM usage is also a little lower. 830 megs of the four gigs of RAM I gave this VM. So we get some different stats running Htop versus the standard GUI system monitor. Now let me quit out of this. I'm gonna run a uname space dash R. Let's get the kernel version. We are kernel 5.4.0-26. Now let me clear the screen and I'm gonna run a snap space list. Now snaps are not installed on Linux Mint. That is nothing new. They actually removed snaps from being installed by default a couple of years back. But now the big controversy with this latest release of Linux Mint 20 is they've actually removed the ability to install SnapD, which allows you to then install snap packages in Linux Mint. Well, they just put a minor obstacle in the way. You can still get snaps if you want. And I can show you that for those of you that are using Linux Mint and actually like snaps, how do you go about still getting your snaps? Well, you need to run this command. And this command, it can be dangerous if you mistype it. So be careful. You need to do a sudo space RM, which is removed. And then you need to do slash Etsy slash APT slash preferences dot D slash and then no snap dot pref. You need to remove that file. And then once you remove that file, if you do a sudo apt install snap D, it will actually let you install snap D. Now that command would have filled had we not removed that no snap dot pref file. And now that we've got that done, could we actually install a snap with sudo snap install? And I don't know, is this Chromium? Is it Chromium or is it Chromium dash browser? I think it's just Chromium. Yeah, and it's gonna pull down the Chromium browser as a snapback. So I know that that's the big deal is getting Chromium installed. And that's usually why people are worried about this snap thing inside Linux Mint. I'm just gonna let that run in the background. Actually don't use Chromium. And I really didn't need it here in this VM, but I wanted to do that on camera because I know a lot of you guys are really kind of worried about the ability to get your snaps still on Linux Mint. It's a very simple fix. All you need to do is remove that one file and then sudo apt install snap D and you're good. Now let me get back to the VM here. I wanna right click on the desktop and I am going to choose change desktop background because the thing with these new releases always is checking out some of the wallpapers. And these are a lot of the same Linux Mint wallpapers that have been around forever. I've seen all of those, but they have this Uyana category for the new release. And this will be the new wallpapers just for this release. Let's check some of these out. And I really like that tree picture and this pink wood. I'm not crazy about that lavender. That's not bad. And Kyoto, pretty nice. And this is kind of abstract art and small town. Not bad. Now these are pretty good photographs. Typically I like things that are more minimal in nature so I would like something actually like this dew drop picture. Yeah, that's not too bad or the leaf here. I might would go with that. Actually the desert one would probably be even. Oh, that's almost blinding though that the orange gets a little too bright for my taste. You know what, I think I'm just gonna go back to one of the standard Linux Mint branded wallpapers. I think I'm just gonna go with that for now. But let's get into the settings panel. I said we would take a look at that and get back here. And if I go to the desktop, this is really what I want because I don't like icons on my desktop so I'm just gonna turn all that off. I like a clean desktop. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I tell you what, Linux Mint 20 Uyana, at least the Cinnamon edition is a very attractive modern looking desktop Linux distribution. And I'm glad that I took this quick first look at it. And I know right now there's a lot of controversy going around because of the whole snap thing. Taking snaps out of Linux Mint and trying to prohibit people from installing snaps. I think that's overblown a little bit. I think a lot of people kind of lost their minds and they probably shouldn't have because it's a very quick fix to get your snaps. It took all of about 30 seconds for me to delete that one file that basically enables you then to install the SnapD Daemon. All in all, it looks like this is a solid distribution. Now before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I wanna thank the producers of the show, Michael, Gabe, Pablo, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy, UK, Arch 5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ Donnie Dillon, George, Omri, Paul, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. These guys, they are the producers of the show. Without these guys, this quick first look at Linux Mint 20 wouldn't have been possible. The show was also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this show is sponsored by you guys, the community. You'd like to support my work. Consider doing so. You'll find DT over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.