Soft Mints, no Snap

“Won’t people think it’s 20 years old?” management asked when they saw our Linux Mint cover. That made us pause. It’s not older than Ubuntu and that’s 15-years old. So we stuck to the facts: Linux Mint 20 is out and it’s about to turn 14-years old on 27 August 2020.

It was Mint 13 that adopted the Cinnamon desktop and helped put Linux Mint on the map. The aim was to create a classic desktop, designed how users wanted a desktop to work – an entirely reasonable request. With Linux Mint 20 there’s been another shift in direction: the distro is distancing itself from Snaps. Again, the reasoning is fair. Snaps are being surreptitiously installed when you apt-get certain packages, and can’t be audited. There’s a vocal group of Mint users who support the shift away from Snaps, and yet the primary users of Snaps outside of Ubuntu… are Mint users. There’s some irony here: people left Ubuntu because it wasn’t offering them what they wanted. Is Mint doing the same thing?

Packaging systems like Snap, Flatpak and Appimage are popular, because they make everyone’s life easier: get the latest build of GIMP with none of the hassles, right? Canonical has made some odd decisions with what it packages as Snaps – Gnome Clock and other small desktop utilities made no sense as Snaps, but that happened at one point – and it’s pushing some users away because of this. But there’s no denying some Mint users want the ease of the Snap system, because they’re installing it in droves. What do you think? Do you use Snaps? Do you hate Snaps? Could you not care less?

Alongside our Mint 20 fest, which starts on page 30, we’ve got another crammed issue full of great articles, and are hoping things go back to normal soon. Enjoy!