Customise Mint
Explore the Cinnamon desktop environment, add new ones and otherwise get your game on.
REBEL WITH A CAUSE “One minor scandal with this release is that Mint is defying Ubuntu’s fondness for its own Snap application packaging format.”
Besides the theme and palette changes available from the Welcome screen (or the preferences area) there’s an awful lot you can do with the Cinnamon desktop. Unlike Gnome, Cinnamon lends itself to customisation. You can add all manner of desktop widgetry from the Desklets application, and you can tweak desktop effects (and even tune the acceleration curve of the various swooshings). Furthermore, there are all kind of gizmos you can add to the taskbar in the Applets section. All of these additions, known as spices, can be browsed at the official website at https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com.
Cinnamon is, of course, not the only spice, and it’s well worth checking out the Mate and Xfce desktops too. You can even add them to your current installation, if you’re willing to brave the Terminal, using an incantation such as:
$ sudo apt install ubuntu-mate-core
Logout, then at the login screen click the icon next to your user, and choose Mate. Be aware that if you do this, as well as adding around 600MB to your install, you’ll also end up with a very busy applications menu, since you’ll get Mate’s core utilities as well as Cinnamon’s. This will be even more pronounced if you opt for the complete ubuntu-mate-desktop package instead. If you don’t like the sound of that, why not install
Virtualbox (you’ll find it in the Software Manager) and fire up the Mint Mate ISO therein. If you want to know more about the terminal, then there’s a great introduction in Mint’s Community section at https://community. linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/100. If you just wish we hadn’t told you to pollute your system with redundant desktop bits then tidy up our mess with:
$ sudo apt remove ubuntu-mate-core –auto-remove
You’ll want to reset the theme options if you do this as you’ll end up with a strange combination of Gnome icons and titlebar buttons.
One minor scandal (at the time of writing at least) with this release is that Mint is defying Ubuntu’s fondness for its own Snap application packaging format (which, like Flatpaks, bundle an application and its dependencies into an easy-to-use, distro-agnostic container). Many applications in Ubuntu are now shipped as Snaps in its own app store, but many can still be installed as traditional debs via the command line.
One exception to this is Chromium, the open source (but not entirely de-googled) version of Chrome. On Ubuntu, if one does:
$ sudo apt install chromium-browser
then one ends up with a dummy .deb package that depends on the Snap version of Chromium. Chromium is a beast of an application to package and test, and Ubuntu has chosen to provide it only in Snap form. Among other things this makes it easier to ship for the 3 LTS releases it has to support at any one time. Team Mint don’t like this, partly because the Snapcraft store
(https://snapcraft.io) is a proprietary affair, and partly because it’s a little sneaky to underhandedly force a Snap when you ask for a .deb. The upshot is that the team has blocked Apt from installing the Snap daemon as a dependency. If you want it, you can install it explicitly and add snaps in the usual way (see below). We should note that Chromium appears to be the only . deb package that acts this way, but this move prevents other packages from doing similar in the future.
If one tries to install Chromium on Mint from the command line, you’ll install an empty package. Mint’s Software
Manager is slightly more helpful and directs you to the official documentation (see their in-depth criticisms and concerns for yourself at https://linuxmint-user-guide. readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap. html) where you’ll learn that if you don’t want the Snap edition of
Chromium, you can use a third-party PPA, or pin the version from the Debian repositories. None of this is ideal, and to be honest we think you should just use Firefox anyway.
If you do want the Snap edition of Chromium (which seems reasonable, being as that’s how Ubuntu do it and Mint is based on Ubuntu) you can do it by first neutering Mint’s Apt override:
$ cd /etc/apt/preferences.d/
$ sudo mv nosnap.pref nosnap.pref.bak
And then installing the Snap daemon and the
Chromium Snap:
$ sudo apt install snapd
$ sudo snap install chromium
This will also avail you of everything in the Snapcraft store, where you’ll find newer versions of things in the
.deb repos, as well as lots of stuff that isn’t. If you want to expel snaps and prevent them coming back, just remove them and snapd and revert the nosnap.pref file above.
Working with Flatpaks
Mint’s Software Manager isn’t entirely beholden to .debs though. The Flatpak format and popoular Flathub remote are set up out of the box. Plenty of programs are available as Flatpaks, including proprietary affairs such as Spotify, Skype, Minecraft and Zoom. You’ll also find newer versions of popular applications in the traditional repos, such as Blender, GIMP and VLC.
There’s also a community maintained Flatpak of
Steam and to tie in with our gaming feature (and because we wanted to play some games) we’ll show you to get that installed. Things like Steam, which have sprawling dependencies that change with the weather, are ideal candidates for these new packaging formats. Developers don’t need to worry about what version of libraries are in each distro’s repo, and users don’t have to have their systems polluted with multiple versions of the same library. There are a couple of gotchas, though. One is that Flatpaks don’t have access to the whole filesystem, which is good for security but bad if, say, your Steam library is not in your home directory. This is easily worked around though, as we’ll see below.
Head to the Software Manager and install the Flathub version of Steam. Notice from the reviews people seem to have a better experience than with the repo version. If you have a Steam library on another device, let the Flatpak access its location with
$ flatpak override --user –filesystem=/mnt/storage com.valvesoftware.steam replacing /mnt/storage with the location your library is mounted at. If you have a Steam Controller, or Steamvr, you’ll need a Udev rule for this to work correctly in games. This involves creating a file in /etc/ udev/rules.d/ and adding your user to the input group. See https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/278 for more on this, or see the screenshot (below left).
You’ll need to log out and log back in for these changes to take effect. At present there’s no way for Flatpaks to uniformly deal with udev rules on the host system, so these have to be added by hand. Incidentally, if you don’t care for new-fangled packaging formats, and still want to install third-party .debs, then Gdebi has been tweaked and updated.
One superb new touch in Mint is that the refresh rate and fractional scaling can now be tweaked, per monitor, straight from the display settings. This saves an awful lot of clicking and xrandr-ing if you use monitors supporting different frequencies, and might make your gaming experience even more enjoyable. Naturally, there’s much more to Mint 20 than we could fit into these seven and a bit pages, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on this fine distribution.