Linux Mint 20.2 Released With Cinnamon 5.0 Desktop

[nomadewolf]

Personally I hope this is the case, specially because "wayland only" solutions will start to appear in the future, and it's bad for then to answer "You can't do this on mint, because it requires wayland"

I think that you can run Wayland in X11 and vice-versa, so we won't loose functionality.
However there's a small performance penalty, and for games that can make the difference, if we're talking reaching 30fps or something like that.

My personal case, I used to use Cinnamon before (still my favorite DE in concept) and at time I was having online classes using my webcam + mic. Every time I was in the classes with a lot of people I couldn't open other tasks without the risk of my notebook stuck and I had to force turn it off and on. Searching for solutions at time, I've decide to give a chance to Wayland, and change to Gnome 3, and suddenly I didn't had those problems anymore. Did another test of using with x11 session and the same problem happened. (note that Gnome 3 is way "heavier" than Cinnamon)

There are specific use cases where one or other distro is better.
I've also encountered issues with Mint before.
Generally said, it's one of the, if not the, most stable/just works i've used.
I also install it on firends' old PCs and i've tried installing Ubuntu, Elementary and Fedora, but they all prefer Mint when they see it. Never had a (newb) friend preferring other distro.

They can do whatever they want with their distro, but so the users. right now x11 is still usable for most of the cases, but there will be a time where this won't be the case anymore, and the gap between this time and a stable release may turn Mint into obsolesce, and I wouldn't like this to happen since I think Mint people do a great job at taking care of "good defaults" which is a topic that I think a lot of DE developers ignore.

Knowing Mint, i wouldn't be surprised if they came out with it working perfectly (or near that) out of the blue...
X11 still works 'fine' and will work fine for years to come.
The end user wouldn't know in a blind test if they're using X11 or Wayland.
The bigger advantages Wayland brings are: smaller simpler code. Modern hardware design and support. And easier to maintain.
The main reason Wayland was made was to have a display server that's easy to maintain, which x11 is not. So the most painful issues regarding x11 are actually on the developers side. It doesn't impact the end-user (much).
So, while there more savvy people that know about Wayland and will trade Mint for other distros, Mint's target user-base won't even know or care about that...

I've also tried dumping Mint several times in the past. But always came back running because other distros always seem to have bigger bugs, issues, etc.

Mate and XFCE (two other great DEs) are already seeing this and are doing their first steps of supporting Wayland, KDE is now treating Wayland as a first class support, and even so are struggling with some minor problems. Gnome is the most stable today, but it was years before they could get in this state.

Mate's project leader is Clement Lefeuvre (Mint's lead) dev.
So you see, he's already getting his hands dirty.
Who's to say he isn't using what he learns in Mate with Cinnamon?
Who's to say he isn't already also working in CInnamon?

Also, i'd like to remind you that Cinnamon is an early fork of Gnome3. Therefore, the base is very similar and it shouldn't be that difficult to port Wayland support back to Cinnamon form Gnome3...
If they play their cards right, the Mint Team will have a fraction of the work that the Gnome3 devs had...

I'm not using Mint anymore, while I do like it a lot, nothing will make me return to x11 (not counting xwayland), but once (if) they start to support wayland, I may change it back to

As long as you're happy with what you're using, that's all that matters.
Linux is about choice.
Each distro presents their view, and each user chooses what suits them better.

[furtadopires]

It's all very debatable, but IMHO, the Mint Team does not like to announce sub-par products or intentions.

They sure are doing a great job at keeping it secret then

When they announce something, it's either something very close to launch or very near completion.
I've never seen them announcing something that will ship in more than a year's time...
So that's my tak on the whole situation.

If this is the case, I don't think making it secret is the best thing to do. It's not like Cinnamon will be ready in day one once they start to support it, so it would be better for then to already release alpha builds for users to test and report bugs, in order to make a better "first stable release"

I believe that Wayland is at or is getting at a point where it makes sense to think about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the Mint Team would come out with support ready for it the next release. But i'd also not be surprised if they didn't.

Personally I hope this is the case, specially because "wayland only" solutions will start to appear in the future, and it's bad for then to answer "You can't do this on mint, because it requires wayland"

The thing is, Mint is about stability, usability and speed.

My personal case, I used to use Cinnamon before (still my favorite DE in concept) and at time I was having online classes using my webcam + mic. Every time I was in the classes with a lot of people I couldn't open other tasks without the risk of my notebook stuck and I had to force turn it off and on. Searching for solutions at time, I've decide to give a chance to Wayland, and change to Gnome 3, and suddenly I didn't had those problems anymore. Did another test of using with x11 session and the same problem happened. (note that Gnome 3 is way "heavier" than Cinnamon)

And if they feel they aren't hampered by X11, they can very well ignore Wayland for a while longer.
And as long as doesn't impact the end-user, i'm ok with it, and i believe most of Mint users are also.
Mint is not about the latest thing.

They can do whatever they want with their distro, but so the users. right now x11 is still usable for most of the cases, but there will be a time where this won't be the case anymore, and the gap between this time and a stable release may turn Mint into obsolesce, and I wouldn't like this to happen since I think Mint people do a great job at taking care of "good defaults" which is a topic that I think a lot of DE developers ignore.

Mate and XFCE (two other great DEs) are already seeing this and are doing their first steps of supporting Wayland, KDE is now treating Wayland as a first class support, and even so are struggling with some minor problems. Gnome is the most stable today, but it was years before they could get in this state.

If you're into that stuff, Fedora, or EndeavourOS are a better fit, and that's perfectly fine.

I'm not using Mint anymore, while I do like it a lot, nothing will make me return to x11 (not counting xwayland), but once (if) they start to support wayland, I may change it back to

[nomadewolf]

The solution is to make all the system icons black .svgs which are easily invertible to white .svgs. This is exactly how KDE does it.

And as for individual apps, such as terminal, the KDE dark taskbar is actually a dark tinted translucent color showing some of the wallpaper behind (much like Apple's dark theme). This gives greater contrast whilst still being decently dark. KDE devs have in fact put a lot of work into optimising the taskbar for high contrast in both light and dark themes.

I presume Linux Mint can handle translucency and blur, or is that too sophisticated for them?

I can't really answer about the level of sophistication behind the OS. But i've 'seen' them achieve some very cool things.
Probably is more of a awareness/design thing.
Mint was worse in the past (reggarding contrast), and if i'm not mistaken it was like 2 releases ago (Mint 20) that they improved themes and contrast, so it's a work in progress, maybe? They like to make progressive improvments that the users hardly notice.
I remember another instance where they released a new icon set and the video icon was very hard to distinguish from the subtilte icon. I complained about it in the blog when they released the beta and it got fixed via updates in less than 24hours.
The Mint Team is very open to constructive criticism, which is another point i love about them.
I'm sure someone will submit a bug and they'll eventually fix it...

[nomadewolf]

But they have to start it sometime, like I've said in another post it's not like they need to make it default already, but at least show some signs they're working on it, and maybe release alpha builds with Wayland Cinnamon so people can already help to test it.

Wayland is not just "a cool new project" it's the successor of x11, and if they want it to be "stable" with Cinnamon then they should begin to work on it already. Unless of course they're already doing it (without telling us), or the process of porting Cinnamon to Wayland is easier than I think.

Personally I think culprit are the "Mint boxes" (with Nvidia cards embed), must be difficult for them to develop software that won't work properly with their on selling products, so it's better to pretend that Wayland isn't a thing already. Now that Nvidia is starting to show signs of support with xwayland, maybe they suddenly start to say "hey Wayland is now a thing and we'll start to work on it", specially if the next Ubuntu lts defaults to it.

It's all very debatable, but IMHO, the Mint Team does not like to announce sub-par products or intentions.
When they announce something, it's either something very close to launch or very near completion.
I've never seen them announcing something that will ship in more than a year's time...
So that's my tak on the whole situation.

I believe that Wayland is at or is getting at a point where it makes sense to think about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the Mint Team would come out with support ready for it the next release. But i'd also not be surprised if they didn't.

The thing is, Mint is about stability, usability and speed.
And if they feel they aren't hampered by X11, they can very well ignore Wayland for a while longer.
And as long as doesn't impact the end-user, i'm ok with it, and i believe most of Mint users are also.
Mint is not about the latest thing.
If you're into that stuff, Fedora, or EndeavourOS are a better fit, and that's perfectly fine.

[furtadopires]

It's not denial. Mint focuses a lot on stability which is kind of exclusive with Wayland.
Wayland is the cool new project, but it's not on par with X11 in terms of stability and features.
As soon as it reaches an acceptable level, i'm sure it'll enter Mint's team radar.

But they have to start it sometime, like I've said in another post it's not like they need to make it default already, but at least show some signs they're working on it, and maybe release alpha builds with Wayland Cinnamon so people can already help to test it.

Wayland is not just "a cool new project" it's the successor of x11, and if they want it to be "stable" with Cinnamon then they should begin to work on it already. Unless of course they're already doing it (without telling us), or the process of porting Cinnamon to Wayland is easier than I think.

Personally I think culprit are the "Mint boxes" (with Nvidia cards embed), must be difficult for them to develop software that won't work properly with their on selling products, so it's better to pretend that Wayland isn't a thing already. Now that Nvidia is starting to show signs of support with xwayland, maybe they suddenly start to say "hey Wayland is now a thing and we'll start to work on it", specially if the next Ubuntu lts defaults to it.

[tornado99]

I don't really understand that argument...
If you add the cmd to the windows 10 taskbar, the same thing will happen.
That's because the cmd icon is dark, and so is the taskbar.
Just like in windows 10, you can change theme if you want.
However, there will always be some app whose icon will not be easy to understand with some DE/OS/Theme combo.
Unless you want to force OS defined standard icons for every app?...

The solution is to make all the system icons black .svgs which are easily invertible to white .svgs. This is exactly how KDE does it.

And as for individual apps, such as terminal, the KDE dark taskbar is actually a dark tinted translucent color showing some of the wallpaper behind (much like Apple's dark theme). This gives greater contrast whilst still being decently dark. KDE devs have in fact put a lot of work into optimising the taskbar for high contrast in both light and dark themes.

I presume Linux Mint can handle translucency and blur, or is that too sophisticated for them?

[nomadewolf]

One thing that doesn't use any extra RAM is a decent colour scheme. The current one for Linux Mint looks absolutely awful. Virtually all black with a weird green highlight. Even in the screeshot shown you can see some buttons blending into the menu, and the terminal icon is basically invisible.

If they can't get really basic things like that right, why would I even bother using Mint?

I don't really understand that argument...
If you add the cmd to the windows 10 taskbar, the same thing will happen.
That's because the cmd icon is dark, and so is the taskbar.
Just like in windows 10, you can change theme if you want.
However, there will always be some app whose icon will not be easy to understand with some DE/OS/Theme combo.
Unless you want to force OS defined standard icons for every app?...

[nomadewolf]

Are they still in denial with Wayland?

It's not denial. Mint focuses a lot on stability which is kind of exclusive with Wayland.
Wayland is the cool new project, but it's not on par with X11 in terms of stability and features.
As soon as it reaches an acceptable level, i'm sure it'll enter Mint's team radar.

[nomadewolf]

The UI is great and doesn't really need much additional changes. The problem is more under the hood. They forked from GNOME many years ago and now GNOME keeps getting a steady stream of commits that do not make it into Cinnamon. That includes important components like the window manager. Mutter keeps getting improvements for Wayland support, multi-monitor fixes, performance/smoothness fixes etc. while the forked Muffin does not. It might have been better to develop Cinnamon as a set of new components and patch sets built on top of upstream GNOME even if that brings its own set of challenges.

That's partly true.
The Mint team regularly merge's improvements from Mutter that they see fit.
I'm sure they did something about the multi monitor support. I just don't know if they imported it, or if it was developed in-house.
About wayland is a different story: one of Mint's largest focus is stability which is something Wayland lacks. This is why there no effort towards Wayland (yet)! However, rest assured that as soon as Wayland reaches a maturity, Mint/Cinnamon will get it!

[nomadewolf]

Exactly this.

Hate to break it to you MATE/GNOME2 zealots who just can't give it up (but again, do you), but the latest GNOME 3 is the best desktop environment out, for me. But I think for a bunch of others too, seeing as it is the default desktop. Sure, it needs customizations, but that's Linux. Do better. And yes, I know my setup looks like Windows. I like it. It's very useful and I have more desktop space.

At least visually, it doesn't look that different from Cinnamon.
I can't really talk about performance now, because i haven't touched it in years.
At the time, i can assure you that it was terrible!!! The paradigm was completely changed overnight, it was slow, buggy and crashed all the time!
Months later, when the first real good plugins or extras or whatever they're called, came in to restore some usabilty to Gnome, it would only make it slower, eat more RAM, CPU and crash more often.
This went on for YEARS!
It's not like i couldn't live witthout Gnome 2. It's more Gnome 3 was unusable, and that is a fact.
I'm sure that by now, it's way better, way more usable, faster, more stable, etc.
But by now, most of us that actually needed to get things done moved on and got used to things that work for us.

Gnome force it's userbase to make a choice: make due with a completely new paradigm that eats all the CPU, RAM and crashes all the time, or find something that works.
And everyone made their choice, and here we are.
As long as the Gnome devs are happy with their choices, you're happy with yours and i'm happy with mine, it's all that matters.