Linux Mint 21.2 Released With Cinnamon Enhancements, Other Desktop Polishing

[Rovano]

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.

But they don't push it alone. There are good reasons to move forward. It's funny that you abandoned GNOME and replaced it with an extension that uses GNOME. And even something like Cinnamon. Which had announced bugs and still has RAM to eat. On the other hand, the main thing is that it works for you.

[anarki2]

Can I set scrolling speed now?

[calc]

But they don't push it alone. There are good reasons to move forward. It's funny that you abandoned GNOME and replaced it with an extension that uses GNOME. And even something like Cinnamon. Which had announced bugs and still has RAM to eat. On the other hand, the main thing is that it works for you.

I'm running Gnome/Xorg currently, but that may not even be an option for much longer. If they don't fix the issues to cause Gnome/Wayland to not crash frequently, before removing Xorg, then I won't really have any choice other than to switch to something else as I have to get actual work done. The last time I tried it a few months ago it was crashing about as often as Windows 95 did nearly 30 years ago.🤦

Also at the same time gnome-shell in Gnome was leaking many GB of RAM Cinnamon worked fine. Cinnamon had forked off from Gnome long before so it was not nearly as buggy. Its a lot more than just an "extension" of Gnome. I think there was eventually a write up about the gnome-shell issue on Phoronix once they finally determined the cause and fixed it.

I have never had any problems with Mint/Cinnamon and most of my other computers still run it.

And my current Gnome setup looks roughly the same as Cinnamon, or Gnome 2, as I hate the default Gnome 3 interface, but ArcMenu and Dash to Panel help a lot.

[esbeeb]

Linux Mint has been a paragon of hardware stability for me, in the many years I've used it - albeit that kernel isn't all that fresh, should you want to run it on really new hardware. I have a couple of small hardware quirks on my Asus Zenbook UX330U:

1) the backlit keyboard always turns on bright upon a fresh boot (Linux Mint Mate only) and the hardware buttons to turn it down work.

2) the secondary HDMI monitor will black out for 3 seconds, then come back on just fine, when I shut the laptop lid (mirrored displays, both 1080p in Linux Mint Cinnamon only).

I love Timeshift with BTRFS for the root fs. Just did 3 restores to snapshots yesterday. Timeshift is underappreciated, IMHO.

[luno]

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

Linux is all about choices, for Wayland Users Fedora is doing so well , recent talk on KDE Akademy has lot of good point

" Entering a Wayland-only World with Plasma 6.0 on Fedora" https://conf.kde.org/event/5/contributions/127

even OpenBSD started moving to Wayland

https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html

Xorg is going to live with us for big time unless Applications start drop support for it due to being unmaintained and insecure, this Wayland/Xorg split is very painful for Application Developers as it doubles the testing time

[schmidtbag]

I've just recently switched to Cinnamon on my gaming PC (from Budgie - for such a basic DE, it breaks way too often and I got fed up). After reading this thread, I wasn't aware there were so many issues with Cinnamon. So far the only significant problem I've encountered is how the window previews in the task tracker causes major performance issues in games. Otherwise, I kinda like it. I'm surprised its so well maintained on Arch.

I'm not keen on the notion that perhaps Wayland will never be supported, but until Wine/Proton gets proper Wayland support, I don't care to switch anyway. Seems like proper Wayland support is coming soon though, so maybe I should already start looking for another alternative - not something so heavy like GNOME or KDE though.

[Old Grouch]

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


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.

I'm running Mint on a 2 GByte RAM laptop with 'sufficient' swap.

There's a memory leak in any or all of Firefox, LibreOffice, and the lock screen that means that the system goes into paging meltdown if I don't restart Firefox and/or LibreOffice regularly. If I don't do that, when the kswapd0 process uses more than one of my two cores, things get a bit slow. By flipping to tty1, I can see the load average ( uptime, or cat /proc/loadavg ) which has exceeded 70 (seventy) on occasion (just logging in on tty1 took 'a while').

So your GUI might not be frozen, just running really, really slowly. Try going to tty1 and running top, for example, and see if anything is taking excessive resources.

[Rovano]

I'm running Gnome/Xorg currently, but that may not even be an option for much longer. If they don't fix the issues to cause Gnome/Wayland to not crash frequently, before removing Xorg, then I won't really have any choice other than to switch to something else as I have to get actual work done. The last time I tried it a few months ago it was crashing about as often as Windows 95 did nearly 30 years ago.🤦

Also at the same time gnome-shell in Gnome was leaking many GB of RAM Cinnamon worked fine. Cinnamon had forked off from Gnome long before so it was not nearly as buggy. Its a lot more than just an "extension" of Gnome. I think there was eventually a write up about the gnome-shell issue on Phoronix once they finally determined the cause and fixed it.

I have never had any problems with Mint/Cinnamon and most of my other computers still run it.

And my current Gnome setup looks roughly the same as Cinnamon, or Gnome 2, as I hate the default Gnome 3 interface, but ArcMenu and Dash to Panel help a lot.

Cinnamon is not just an extension. It just got lost in translation.
However, it still contains scripts that check if it has spawned in RAM.
You always write humorously. Since Cinnamon is moving to some component forked from GNOME. It makes it more stable. And you say that it is already stable and GNOME is not. Remarkably.

Fortunately, there are really stable desktop environments. Who is serious.

[marlock]

I've never used Mint, but I fail to see how it's "unnerving" that a project that is known for its conservative approach is not using an experimental display server which has given endless headaches to other projects. It's exactly what I would expect.

No, I'm ok with it currently not being their default. What's unnerving is that they don't even acknowledge this as part of Linux Mint's and Cinnamon DE's roadmap.

I usually play it cool (eg: haven't tried other distros yet) because I like their conservative stance and because time and time again I've seen them disclose the next steps on the distro's roadmap only once a development goal is nearing beta...

...but in this case if you try to find clues in the distro forums and even their public development repos and issue trackers you'll find users being met with Mint devs saying they can't because Cinnamon needs to support it first, and Cinnamon devs saying it's not necessary because Mint doesn't use it or something to that tautological effect.

The only recent move and closest to an answer was their post about rebasing Muffin over a much newer version of Mutter (yes, they did do that recently), where they sort of mention this being the biggest thing that they needed done before even considering Wayland support in either the distro or the DE.

It is, as I said, not a terrible situation... just unnerving.

[CorpSouth]

it's also unnerving that Mint and Cinnamon haven't officially moved an inch towards wayland support yet...

It's more unnerving how Wayland fanatics all sound like salespeople, while lacking the credentials to be remotely good salespeople.