 One of the most popular Linux distributions is Linux Mint and it's popular for really good reason. It's very stable. It's often updated. It's well supported. There's a large community out there that uses Linux Mint. So if you need help, you can go find help really easily and it's based on Ubuntu. So that means that you get access to just a ton of software. It's also popular with people who don't like snaps because snaps aren't included out of the box. So you can kind of use an Ubuntu like system without having to deal with all the snap not sense. I'm not a particular fan of Linux Mint. If you watch the channel, I think you probably know that, but I do tend to watch for new releases and recently they released Linux Mint 20.3, which is the last iteration of the 20 series I believe. So what I thought I'd do today is take a look at some of the new features that you can expect if you give Linux Mint 20.3 a try. So let's go ahead and jump in. Okay. So when you first log into Linux Mint 20.3, you'll get the standard old Linux Mint welcome screen and there's nothing wrong with this welcome screen. It's not the best that I've ever seen. It's not the worst that I've ever seen. It gives you exactly what you should have to have in order to get started with Linux Mint. One of the cool things that they enable is allowing you to choose between the dark theme and the light theme right here from the welcome screen. Every Linux distribution that uses a desktop environment should do this because the light screen is the light theme is stupid and shouldn't exist. So we're just going to switch to the dark theme and we're going to choose an accent color. We'll choose purple because I don't like minty green. I can't help it. I just don't. Which is weird because green is my favorite color, but I don't like this particular shade of green. You can also choose the panel layout from here, including modern or traditional. It will change that right on the fly. The thing about updates in Linux Mint is that they're a little bit more forceful than they used to be. Now I did not take a look at 20.2 or if I did, I don't remember. I'm not sure if it was that release or this release where Linux Mint decided that they're going to go through and start to prod users a little bit more about updates. Now I've already updated the system because almost immediately upon start up the update manager was there. So I just went ahead and did the updates. It took about 10 minutes. This was just released yesterday. So there weren't that many updates, but anyways, that's the welcome screen. Now of the new features that we should care about, there are a few things with the theme changes. So let's go ahead and get rid of this drivers notification, which won't go away. And if we open up a file manager, this is Nemo. And Nemo is one of the best file managers that you can use. It's really, really good. And one of the things you can see, or maybe you can't see, is that we now have rounded corners. Now one of the things that distros often do when they do rounded corners is they mess up the touch targets. So when you hover over the corner, you expect to be able to resize it. And one of the things that they've done, at least fairly nicely, is that they've kept those touch targets really easy to get to, at least on the top and even the bottom. Now, a lot of times the bottom is kind of ignored, and it's still not perfect. Like you kind of really have to be on that corner for it to show up. But I've seen some distros where it's just way, way worse. When they do the rounded corners thing, sometimes the corners like out here or in here, like it's not even at the corner. So they really mess it up. They did a really nice job around in those corners. And they've also taken some stuff out of the title bar. The title bars previously were quite small, so now they've made those things bigger. And supposedly that is to make it more pleasant and generous is what they say in the release notes. I don't know. I mean, I don't really notice a difference, but I'm sure if you compared the old title bars and the new title bars, you'd probably notice the difference more. They've also widened the hover zone over the buttons. I'm assuming when they say that they mean these buttons here, the open, closed and minimized buttons, so that they're easier to press. They've also made changes to the buttons themselves. They said that the maximize and unmaximized icon is more intuitive than before. That's exactly what they said. So now they've gone through and as you see, saw in the welcome screen, they've added accent colors. So they're allowing you to change that from the welcome screen. And what I have noticed, and maybe I'm just missing something, is if you search for settings, and you search or even themes, I guess you can search for themes. When you want to change the accent color again, you don't actually have a place you're called accent color. I believe this is what they want you to change here. So if we change to like red or something, and then you have to change individually these things here. And that's not a big problem. It's just a little bit inconsistent. You know what I mean? They call those things accent colors in here. They're calling them various things that you kind of have to change across the board. It'd be nice if that little changer that they have in the welcome center was actually in the theme set, in the theme or in the settings panel. If it is, I've missed it. But it's possible it is there, and I just didn't see it. So they've updated the dark mode so that supports across many more applications and also have made it more consistent across applications that do support it. So there are several applications now that are shipped with dark mode, including cellulite, hypnotics, X viewer, pics, and you know, terminal. In this release, we also have several updates to a few of the Linux Mint specific applications. So if we type in hypnotics, if we can spell this, this is their IPTV thing. And I'm not going to click on these buttons because I don't actually want to start playing anything and get demonetized. But this is the thing where you can watch TV through the internet. They've updated the UI here. They've also included a new search function so that you can easily find TV channels, movies, and series. And they've also added M3U and local playlist. The IP, so the IPTV player can support the Xtreme API, which I have no clue what that is. But if this is your thing, that's probably good news. I mean, more support for other things is always going to be good news. So that's hypnotics. As you can tell, it also has a dark thing. Okay, so the next thing that they updated was a thing called Thingy. And Thingy is an app that is meant to help you manage your documents. Now, when I first read this, I was like, what even is that? And I can't actually tell you what that is because I don't actually have any documents on this system. But apparently what it will do is it will give you quick access to your favorite and recently opened documents and keeps track of your reading progress. So I guess if you went through and did a lot of reading in library office documents, I'm not sure what this actually supports. It does not say on the website at all. So you'd have to kind of play around with this. But if you do a lot of like comic book reading, it shows in the screenshot on their website. It shows comic books and things like that. So I'm wondering if this supports like, what is it, CRB is the comic book format? I might be wrong on those letters, but it also shows that it supports CBC and EPUBs. So you could also read books. So they call this a document manager, but it's kind of more like an e-reader from what I can tell. A Thingy is a stupid name though. I'm just gonna put that out there right now. That's a dumb name, Thingy. That sounds like they just couldn't come up with a name and decided that they were just gonna call it Thingy. All right, and the other application that was updated was Sticky Notes. They now have a search function in their Sticky Notes application here. And the look of the notes was improved by embedding the title within the notes. So you can add a title. You can also go through and change the text and the text format and stuff right here from the note. You no longer have to do that from within the application from what I can tell. Now in Cinnamon itself, they have several more upgrades. This is Cinnamon 5.2, and they now have calendar integration which allow events in the applet to use the same color as the calendar they belong to so that if you have multiple calendars, they can be kind of color coordinated. The applet syncs with evolution data server so it supports things from the evolution email client, I believe, is what that's talking about. And it'll also work with GNOME calendar. So if you use GNOME calendars, you can also see your events here in the little applet thing in the bar, which you probably can't see because my face is probably right there in the middle of the way. So we'll move the camera over here. I'm glad I remembered that always. That would have been embarrassing. All right, anyways, so this is where you'd see the calendar integration here in the applet that is in the bar. So there are several other smaller improvements. So for example, when files are moved or copied and some of them are in conflict with existing files of the same names, NEMA will now show additional options so that you can choose what to do, whether or not you can skip ignore or overwrite them. And that's pretty common in other file managers. So that's nice to see that added window animations have been tweaked a little bit so that they're a little bit more simple and don't take nearly as much time. They have a new configuration options for workspace notifications and window list applets here in the bar. So if we look for applets, we can search for work if I can spell. So the workspace switcher applet now has an option to disable scrolling. So if we want to look for search here, we can actually see we can disable or reverse scroll here for the scroll bar. That means when you're hovering over it, it doesn't go between workspaces if you use the scroll wheel. You can just disable that if you want to. The notification applet has a new setting to hide the counter and the window list applet now has an option to remove labels. And then if we take a look at some of the things that aren't new, we can test see what the kernel is here if I can type, which I apparently can't. This is 5.4.0. So this is still a boon to 20.04. So this is going to be pretty old. This isn't even the most recent LTS of a kernel. So we're not expecting a kernel update to Linux Mint until we get to the 21 series, which will be released probably sometime this year, I guess, because it's usually based on the new LTS. So we won't see any new kernels there. We can see if htop is installed, which is not. And I can remember we've been going through and opening stuff up. So this isn't going to be all that accurate, but it's using about 786 megs, which isn't bad for, again, opening up a ton of stuff. It's running 96 tasks, 219 threads, which is about normal. It's way less than GNOME. So that's a win there. And this is obviously way less than GNOME because GNOME is usually well over a gigabyte. And like I said, we've gone through and opened stuff up. So there's probably stuff running in the background. We can close this terminal here now and we can open up in Firefox and see what version of Firefox we get. So this is version 95.01, which I believe that's the latest or at least close to the latest. So you are getting some updated files or updated applications here. Sorry about the damn dog. She won't stop talking. When I'm doing videos, she was doing it on the last video I recorded too. So all right, anyways, I don't know why she decided to start barking. Always does. Anyways, so that is Firefox. So as is usual with Linux Mint, these dot releases, you're not expecting to get a ton of new features. These are more refinement stuff where they're going through and making the theme look a little bit better, going through and making sure that each of the applications kind of are more refined. So the additions to things like Nemo and the file transfer dialogue are examples of the kind of updates you'll expect in a Linux Mint dot release, because these are just small refinements to make the existing version of Mint even better. Now, there are probably other changes with the XFCE and Monte versions. You'll have to definitely check those out if you're more interested in those desktop environments. I chose Cinnamon because I'm assuming that it's the most popular version of Mint out there because a lot of people use Mint and it's their flagship. So that is Linux Mint. Anyway, so that is it for this video. If you're going to try Linux Mint 20.3, you can leave those comments in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter at LinuxCast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com. SlashLinuxCast. Before I go, I would like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. 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