Mint 19.2 Cinnamon
there’s very little that gets us more excited than a new Mint release, especially when it happens with plenty of time to get it on the disc and write a cover feature all about it. In keeping with tradition, this release has a female codename, Tina.
For users of 64-bit machinery, we present the flagship Cinnamon edition of Mint 19’s second point release. The base of these releases follow the Ubuntu point releases, so there’s all the brand new software and gubbins from there, as well as the option to install the latest hardware enablement (HWE) stack for a newer kernel and video drivers.
But there’s also a whole heap o’ features on which Team Mint have been hacking away over the past six months. The keen-eyed among you will notice that the official Ubuntu font is now used by the default Mint Y theme and its predecessor Mint X. Cinnamon has seen a not inconsiderable volume of other cosmetic and not-so-cosmetic improvements. For one, it uses less RAM and thanks to window manager (Muffin) improvements, it should feel much smoother and more responsive. There’s better support for Flatpak, both in terms of theming and in terms of handling a situation where both a Flatpak and a regular package of the same application are installed. This could result in identical menu entries, which was annoying.
Speaking of annoying, one of the myriad newfangled desktop things that defy a lot of people’s thinking is overlay scrollbars: ones that only pop to their full width when you hover over some infeasibly small margin. These can now be configured or neutered entirely. There’s also improved Samba support in the Nemo file manager, which might be good news if you’ve built a NAS device recently – perhaps inspired by our storage feature in lxf252.
If you’re already running Mint 19.1 and don’t fancy a reinstall, you can upgrade directly by following the instructions on the Mint blog at https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3792.