First steps
Explore your freshly minted new operating system and feel instantly at home. Go on, put your feet up!
Having installed Mint and booted it successfully (see the box, below, if things didn’t quite go to plan) you’ll be presented with a friendly Welcome screen with a First Steps section that walks you through common post-installation tasks. You’ll also find links to the documentation and release notes, as well as shortcuts to the IRC channels and forums. But let’s do like the good hominids of Happisburgh did 800 thousand years ago and take our first steps.
Appearance is, for some, important. And lots of work has gone into the Mint-y theme introduced in Mint 19. Mint has long been characterised by its verdant hues, but a carefully chosen palette of other colour options are now available for both light and dark themes. And there are plenty of other themes available. You can also choose the traditional panel layout and the classic Mint-x theme if you prefer things old school. And if you’re still reeling from last month’s exciting file manager Roundup, then it may please you to hear that yellow folder icons (like in
4Pane or the Windows 3.1 File Manager of Yore) are available, too.
One of the highlights of Mint 19 was the Timeshift backup program, and it’s been refined in Mint 20.
Timeshift, for the uninitiated, is something akin to Time Machine on macos or System Restore on Windows. It automates backing up your system files using the magic of Rsync or, if you opted to install using Btrfs, COW snapshots. Either way after the initial backup you’ll hardly notice it’s there, since it operates incrementally, storing only the differences between the present state and the last backup. The First Steps wizard will walk you through creating your first backup (which may take a few minutes and will require about 6GB of space) and setting up a schedule. Its suggested five weekly and five daily snapshots might seem overkill, but it’s nice to have options around where exactly to roll back to.
Timeshift won’t back up your home directory unless you tell it to, and we’d recommend using a separate program for this, or even just backing up your important personal files on an ad hoc basis. You don’t really want to keep all the caches and downloads and old settings files that accrue in there, because these will eat into your storage and are unlikely to be of much use.
Choose when to update
Like any desktop operating system, Mint will be updated and it’s good practice to install these update files in a timely manner. Unlike a certain other popular desktop OS though, it won’t force these upon you and your computer will still be useable while they’re installing.
Occasionally they’ll require a restart, but you can elect when to do this (occasionally things will stop working until you do this).
The first time you run the update manager it’ll offer to switch you to a local mirror, which you should probably do. It will suggest the fastest ones. Note that these are only for the Mint-specific packages; the official Ubuntu packages come from Canonical’s repos, which automatically redirect you to a local source. Slightly confusingly, the
Update Manager may also insist on updating itself before it updates the rest of the system. In the event that an update breaks things, or indeed if you break things, you can use the
Timeshift backups you wisely set up earlier. Even if you can no longer boot Mint, you can use still use
Timeshift from the live medium. It’s often said that Linux doesn’t get viruses and doesn’t need a firewall, and using one makes you more attractive, but at most only one of these things is true. There are plenty of cross-platform threats nowadays, and plenty of reasons to run a firewall. Your home network might not use IPV6, and if it does your home router should do a good enough job of preventing incoming connections, but this is no reason to be complacent. The UPNP protocol has long been a perennial target (see https://callstranger.com for the latest) and if you were to download and execute a rogue script, or visit the wrong kind of website, not only could you unwittingly enrol your machine in a botnet, but the rest of your network might become vulnerable too.
If you’re not running any services then it’s easy to set up a firewall to block incoming connections and give an extra layer of security. Launch Gufw (a frontend for Ufw, the Uncomplicated Firewall) either from the First Steps screen or from Preferences>firewall Configuration. Hit the Status switch and your firewall is activated. You can set up different profiles for Home, Office and Public networks (you probably want other people to be able to SSH into your machine at home, but it’s unlikely you want this on a public wireless network). You can see what services are listening from the Report tab, and create rules based on that. No need to get one’s hands dirty dealing with Iptables syntax (although Ufw uses that behind the scenes, so if you really want to, you can).
There’s much more you can do from the Welcome application, including stopping it annoying you on every log in (the checkbox at the bottom-right, if you need to feel welcome again, you’ll find a Welcome Screen shortcut in the Preferences menu). You’ll find everything you need to get started is included in your install: Firefox, the Libreoffice suite and a variety of the latest Gnome 3.36 applications. You’ll also find it much snappier than the live environment.
One of the highlights, application-wise, of Mint 20 is the fantastically-titled Warpinator. If you’ve ever had to get files from one computer to another, but can’t be bothered making the journey downstairs with a USB stick, this is for you. Back in the day, Mint used to bundle an application called Giver. This enabled one to set up simple filesharing (in the style of Airdrop) on one’s home network. No one wants to set up NFS or Samba (or, criminally inefficient, resort to using a cloud service) just to send a couple of photos around. Giver was abandoned (you can still find relics from it on Google’s defunct code pages), but now Mint has created its own fileteleportation tool. Other machines running Warpinator are automatically detected and, if you enjoy watching progress bars, you’ll be pleased to hear it shows how fast your files are being warped and how long they’ll take.
KEEP MINT IN TIP-TOP SHAPE “Like any desktop operating system, Mint will be updated and it’s good practice to install these update files in a timely manner.”
Sooner or later, you’ll want to install some additional applications, which you can do from the Software
Manager. Besides the shortcut in the Welcome Screen, there’s another one if you open the Mint menu (bottomleft) and click the icon below the Firefox shortcut. Alternatively (and you’ll soon find that this is the quickest way to find things), just type the first few letters of software with the menu open, and you’ll see the menu instantly filtered. Hit Return to open the top entry.
Inside the Software Manager you’ll find popular applications at the top and a list of categories for you to peruse below. If you know what you’re looking for use the search box in the top-right. Mint 20 includes out of the box support for Flatpak applications, and there’s a category dedicated entirely to them. Thanks to Flatpak, popular applications that used to be awkward to install on Mint (and indeed Ubuntu) are now only a click away. See over the page to get the new-fangled Steam Flatpak up and running.