Desktop decisions
Some would say it’s sacrilege to run anything but Cinnamon on Mint, and some never run a firewall. Those people are not us.
firewall with me “We’ve tended to shy away from recommending desktop users to use a firewall, partly because most desktop users aren’t running any services.”
cinnamon and MATE adhere in their own ways to more traditional ideas about how a desktop should be. Some people have other ideas; some of those involve doing everything from the command line, some of them (like the i3 window manager) rely heavily on remembering a few dozen finger-stretching keyboard shortcuts, and some of them involve Gnome 3. It’s a fairly radical departure from traditional desktops, but we’ve adapted to it quite nicely over the years.
Desktop Ubuntu 18.04 uses Gnome 3, having abandoned Unity a few years back, and includes its own dock – an element glaringly absent from stock Gnome – to make life easier for newcomers. If you want to try out Gnome 3 without the whole battery of applications that come with it, you can do:
$ sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-gnome
You’ll then be asked to choose a display manager, which is the component that handles graphical logins. Push Tab to highlight the options and then choose ‘gdm3’. Or choose ‘lightdm’ if you want – it worked for us, but other people haven’t been so lucky. Log out of Cinnamon; in fact, reboot if you changed the display manager. Click the menu next to the password dialogue at the login screen. You should find some new options, including Ubuntu, Ubuntu on Wayland, and Gnome on Xorg. Mint doesn’t focus much on Wayland, and Ubuntu still don’t use it by default, but it is the way things are going and many people are using it without issue. The Ubuntu sessions give you a dock along the left edge of the screen to remind you of the good old Unity days. If you need to switch the display manager do so with:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3
Like so many before us, we may decide we don’t like Gnome, and we can banish it from our lives with:
$ sudo apt remove ubuntu-gnome-desktop
and then clean up any unneeded packages with:
$ sudo apt autoremove
This is also a nice illustration of how to tidy up after installing new packages in general. You can also use purge instead of remove to delete any configuration files belonging to the offending packages, hopefully wiping all trace of them from your system. There are a number of other desktop environments, some of which you can use the Mint metapackages to install without drowning yourself in apps. Here’s a handy list:
MATE: You may have tried MATE already on the DVD, or you may be running it. It’s a delightful fork of Gnome 2. Install it with a pleasantly tongue-twisting
sudo apt install mint-meta-mate
Xfce: Xfce is probably slightly lighter than MATE, and has its own committed following. See why they’re so committed with sudo apt install mint-meta
LXQT: This is quite an exciting project that will power the next edition of Lubuntu, now that the Gtk2-based LXDE is headed for desktop Valhalla. It’s powered by Qt, like Plasma, but unlike Plasma is minimal and lightweight. If you don’t believe us run sudo apt install lubuntu-qt-core . Choose /usr/bin/fluxbox as a Window manager.
There used to be an official KDE flavour of Mint, but that is no more. KDE on Mint 19 seems to be quite tricky, since the kubuntu-desktop package clashes with Cinnamon in some weird way – it’s to do with the custom version of python-software-properties used by Mint’s software manager. A reckless approach is to use sudo apt install kde-full to install 2GB of KDE goodness, but this is still missing a few key components like a window manager and screen configurator, so we wouldn’t recommend it.
mexico will pay for this firewall
It’s pretty common for pundits to laud the security of desktop Linux, and statements like “You don’t need an antivirus on Linux” are (erm…–ed) pretty common.
That’s actually true – unless you’re running a mail server or anything dealing with arbitrarily uploaded files – but it might in fact be true on Windows too. Antivirus software in general is pretty bad, and unless you’re actively downloading and running stuff from dodgy sites, it will largely just bog down your system with unnecessary scans, background processes and requests to update itself every ten minutes.
We’ve also tended to shy away from recommending desktop users to use a firewall, partly because most desktop users aren’t running any services – which precludes a big chunk of attack surface – but mostly because manually setting up a firewall with Iptables is a little terrifying. Fortunately, Mint provides an uncomplicated firewall called Ufw –guess what that stands for – and a GUI, Gufw, to control it. Oh, and just to clarify, it’s completely free and no country will be charged for using it (damned right – Efrain Hernandezmendoza, Art Editor).
You can configure Gufw from Preferences > Firewall configuration. If you’re not running any services the default configuration to block all incoming packets and allow all outgoing will work fine. Activate it by hitting the switch. You probably are running some services, albeit things like avahi and cups which are hopefully only addressable via your LAN. You can check this from the report tab. If you want to run peer-to-peer applications, and certain network games (most things will work fine with the default configuration) that require or desire incoming connections, there are some preconfigured rules to open the requisite ports.
If you do really want random machines from the internet to be able to connect to your machine, you’ll need to use NAT to direct the appropriate traffic from your router to your machine. If you use IPV6 your router will likely still block traffic, but you can enable it from its administration page. Click the + button at the bottom of the Rules tab to add a rule, choose an application from the giant drop-down box, or use the search box at the bottom to filter it first.
Having a stricter firewall policy might be a good idea if you’re worried that local users like the one we set up earlier might download and run unsavoury scripts.
das boot
If you crave a faster boot time, or at least are desirous of knowing why it’s not faster, the systemd-analyze tool can help you. Run systemd-analyze blame to see the list of Systemd units involved in the boot sequence and how long they took. For extra data science points, run systemd-analyze plot > bootchart.svg to generate a neat chart of your boot in the current directory.
Systemd parallelises things to the best of its ability, but sometimes a given unit can hold up the whole boot. The bright red bars in the chart indicate where this has happened. Common culprits are mounting obscure, broken or network filesystems – which you can do something about – and delays waiting for wireless networks to connect, which you can’t. Either way, we hope you enjoy booting and indeed using Mint, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.