Linux Mint 21.2 Released With Cinnamon Enhancements, Other Desktop Polishing

[calc]

What's the point of not using WAYLAND in 2023 with its security perks? (no matter how "not ready" is yet for your videogames fix)
Simply tells what you value the most: security basics/core VS playing videogames.
Get your priorities right, there's no excuses.

At least one major point is that Wayland (protocol) still doesn't even work properly under Gnome/Mutter, which is its target platform where it should, in theory at least, work the best.

Considering many Linux developers actually use MBPs with macOS, even at Red Hat, I wouldn't be surprised if none of them actually use Wayland for more than a short time per day.

I've been running Fedora for the past few years, Debian/Ubuntu/Mint prior to that, and try Wayland with every new release. I tried Wayland with current Fedora 38 and had to change gdm/gnome to go back to Xorg nearly immediately as Wayland was still constantly breaking, and nearly 15 years after Wayland was first released.

I don't even play games or do other 'unusual things' with my desktop, and have an old AMD RX 5500 (2019) with open source drivers, so nothing bleeding edge or nvidia.

Maybe in another 15 years Wayland, and the compositors that implement it, will finally work for a basic desktop setup.

If a dist dropped Xorg my only real options would be to either switch dists or go back to Windows/macOS as Wayland does not work reliably for real world desktop use.👎

[horizonbrave]

(A bunch of allegations without any proof or data)

What drama did you have with Wayland you little fella? I used without problems for the last 2 years, on Fedora as you... what are you trying to do with your computer?
It sounds you're just trolling.
Enjoy Windows, nothing wrong with that if that's where you belong

[calc]

What drama did you have with Wayland you little fella? I used without problems for the last 2 years, on Fedora as you... what are you trying to do with your computer?
It sounds you're just trolling.
Enjoy Windows, nothing wrong with that if that's where you belong

The screen would just crash altogether in less than a single days usage. Xorg on the other hand works fine for months at a time, using all the same software.

I don't use Linux for just a few hours a day. I typically use it 12 hours+ per day, as I am a linux developer, and I measure my desktop uptime in months, at least with Xorg. I generally only reboot for kernel security upgrades.

At least Gnome itself under Xorg is now reliable, a few years ago gnome-shell couldn't handle running without leaking massive amounts of RAM (10s of GB) in a single day. I ran Mint/Cinnamon back then as Gnome was so unreliable.

It seems groups like Fedora/Red Hat are pushing hard to drop Xorg in the near future, well before Wayland even works reliably for a single day. RHEL 10 will be dropping Xorg and they will probably push Fedora to before then sometime in 2024.

I've been using Linux as my sole desktop for over 29 years so I'm not looking forward to being forced off Linux.

[Teadrinker]

Mint seems to suffer from weird bugs that are difficult to isolate and explain.

Over the years I have had problems with the installer, despite being basically the same installer used by various other distros that will install just fine on my hardware.

Numerous Mint versions and editions have a weird bug where the system will run fine for days and all of a sudden i will get random freezing of the GUI, to the point where I need to do a hard reboot.

You have the oddity that other distros that use it's flagship desktop, that the Mint developers created, running better on other distributions, such as Fedora, than it does on the OS they created it for.

I just wish we could finally get one to rule them all, have all the developers from all these smaller distros just group their efforts into one really great distro, but that's never going to happen because they all have different visions but none of them seem capable of accomplishing what they want.

Personally been using mint 21.1 for last 8 months (mostly for gaming) and haven't seen this even once. I repeat, not ONCE.
Also my ancient laptop has been running mint (at least 5-6 years old version) for the last 8 years and again no such problem..
Also only have used Cinnamon mostly..

[partcyborg]

What's the point of not using WAYLAND in 2023 with its security perks? (no matter how "not ready" is yet for your videogames fix)
Simply tells what you value the most: security basics/core VS playing videogames.
Get your priorities right, there's no excuses.

Because these "security issues" people get so worked up over are basically irrelevent to single user desktop machines running nothing but trusted software. Sure, a rogue X app could do nasty things like spy on other X apps, but if all of your software comes from trusted sources there isn't much of a risk of that happening and it absolutely isn't worth putting up with a less functional system if wayland isn't working for you.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I'm a big fan of Mint, it's easily the best of the Ubuntu-based distros and they showed remarkable sense with having a Debian Edition ticking over in the background in the event that Ubuntu ever goes and does something that they can't fix or work around.

I have had issues that others have mentioned here, but not recently. Cinnamon used to lock up when I was still running Mint 17 and 18 on one of my systems (a triple 1440p rig) if I didn't restart X every few... weeks. If I ran a single monitor it took longer than when running three, so I suspect a memory leak? I've had it refuse to install on several systems (for two of which, this actually turned out to be SR-IOV related for some weird reason and was solved by enabling it in the UEFI) for the other, CentOS, Fedora and Debian wouldn't install either... only Arch, so I don't really count that as a strike against Mint any more than some hardware exotica which was too new at the time.

I ran Cinnamon on Manjaro, which started out great but over the course of about 18 months of updates things just got steadily more and more broken (a desktop link to Nemo opening the music player, for example) but should I blame that on Cinnamon or Manjaro given the other fun I've had with it (AUR, etc)? Not tried it on Fedora so can't comment there.

I got Cinnamon to build on ARM64 for my little Jetson Nano, just to see if I could... when I boot it up, it's perfectly happy and much snappier than the Gnome Shell desktop the Jetson image comes with.

When I was playing around with waypipe, it broke the connections even more often than XQuartz on Apple silicon (never used an Intel Mac so don't know if it's better or the same on those) and remoting a full desktop when all I need is a single window seems rather overkill. That was a time ago, though, perhaps it has improved recently. If I can't have ssh -X, Wayland is as useful as a chocolate teapot to me.

That said, I'm not a mad fan of the theme choices the last two releases have made - I like sharp, crisp lines on my windows, not this rounded corner nonsense! - and the new default cursor theme is... well, if I'm being generous I would say it is inaccurate. If trying to do anything delicate, the "tip" of the cursor is not correctly placed. If less generous? Ugly as sin. And unless you go digging in some config file buried God-only-remembers-where-'cause-I-don't some windows will just revert the cursor theme while the cursor is over them (my work VPN client does this) (also SSH X sessions too, despite setting the cursor theme to a non-default one on the remote host).

Mint used to be an "install it and forget it" distro for me, and while it mostly still is (bar a couple of apt installs for other programs) I'm wondering if it's time I went distro hopping again. I'm automatically resistant to anything that YouTube pushes on me, but NixOS does look intriguing.

[Rovano]

i used to hope Mint would join Solus and make Solus Cinnamon Edition with all of Mints UI/UX over Solus core components...

everytime Mint rebases over a newer Ubuntu LTS the parent distro's issues show up a bit more, so moving away from this and into a desktop-oriented rolling-release stable-but-fresh-updates distro base without suffering through Budgie (I really don't like it, but I know it's a matter of taste) would be so much fun


it's also unnerving that Mint and Cinnamon haven't officially moved an inch towards wayland support yet... I think I understand why...it's a small team so they'll probably hold off until the last moment, when they can rebase to newer Ubuntu and Gnome upstream components when Wayland is better sorted out then iron out their specific kinks afterwards with minimal wasted effort... but still unnerving due to very little official info on their part


other than that it's by far my favourite distro and I've been daily driving it everywhere for almost a decade

Maybe you will see it in the next 3 years. Maybe they'll have more time now.

[Rovano]

Mint seems to suffer from weird bugs that are difficult to isolate and explain.

Over the years I have had problems with the installer, despite being basically the same installer used by various other distros that will install just fine on my hardware.

Numerous Mint versions and editions have a weird bug where the system will run fine for days and all of a sudden i will get random freezing of the GUI, to the point where I need to do a hard reboot.

You have the oddity that other distros that use it's flagship desktop, that the Mint developers created, running better on other distributions, such as Fedora, than it does on the OS they created it for.

I just wish we could finally get one to rule them all, have all the developers from all these smaller distros just group their efforts into one really great distro, but that's never going to happen because they all have different visions but none of them seem capable of accomplishing what they want.

You can try again. We've seen issues as well and they seem to have been fixed for some time now.

[Rovano]

It's based on 5.15 LTS (ubuntu 22.04 default kernel) and not 6.1 LTS.

You see. And mine runs on version 22.04.02-3 and there is kernel 5.19. I expect another upgrade at the turn of August/September. But otherwise you only need to install 1 package and you can choose between kernel 6.0 or 6.1. But it's not so much in plain sight for the right reasons. Search for linux-image-oem.

[Rovano]

At least one major point is that Wayland (protocol) still doesn't even work properly under Gnome/Mutter, which is its target platform where it should, in theory at least, work the best.

Considering many Linux developers actually use MBPs with macOS, even at Red Hat, I wouldn't be surprised if none of them actually use Wayland for more than a short time per day.

I've been running Fedora for the past few years, Debian/Ubuntu/Mint prior to that, and try Wayland with every new release. I tried Wayland with current Fedora 38 and had to change gdm/gnome to go back to Xorg nearly immediately as Wayland was still constantly breaking, and nearly 15 years after Wayland was first released.

I don't even play games or do other 'unusual things' with my desktop, and have an old AMD RX 5500 (2019) with open source drivers, so nothing bleeding edge or nvidia.

Maybe in another 15 years Wayland, and the compositors that implement it, will finally work for a basic desktop setup.

If a dist dropped Xorg my only real options would be to either switch dists or go back to Windows/macOS as Wayland does not work reliably for real world desktop use.👎

But it works pretty well and is getting better by leaps and bounds. I have a nvidia and was playing 3D games on it in the spring. Jens, I don't have long-term experience with this because I have XFCE now. And it's not publicly supported by Wayland yet. Equally happy with PipeWire or the Grub2 replacement.