ON YOUR FREE DVD Linux Mint 20.1 Sparky Linux 5.14
There’s nothing quite like a new edition of Linux Mint to complement the coming of spring (or autumn for our topsy-turvy southern hemisphere readers). We’ve been recommending it to beginners for many years. The distribution is entirely funded by donations and sponsorship, and has a large and friendly community who will be only too happy to help you if you get stuck.
Mint is based on Ubuntu (probably the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution), and uses Canonical’s repositories so users have instant access to the wealth of thoroughly tested software there. They also enjoy the same generous five-year support period of the Ubuntu LTS, so you can happily keep using this release until 2025. Mint earned its reputation by “giving users what they want”, first by bundling multimedia libraries and drivers and later, when Ubuntu switched to its own Unity desktop, by making its own (much more traditional) desktop environment, Cinnamon.
New in Mint 20.1 is the Web Apps function, which enables you to turn any website into a desktop application, in that it’ll have its own window and menu icon. We use many websites today exactly as we would regular applications, and we’ll give anything a shot if it reduces the dozens of open tabs our browsing necessitates. More and more people are using IPTV (internet protocol television), to stream media directly from providers, and Mint 20.1 now includes a new IPTV player, Hypnotix. If you’re curious, it’s preconfigured to stream from a free provider.
When Mint 20 was released the team, citing user concerns about the snapcraft.io centralised app store, chose not to adopt Canonical’s Snap packaging format. This divergence from its ancestor is nothing if not bold, since most applications found in Ubuntu’s Software Centre now use the new format by default. Indeed, Chromium is only available in Snap form in Ubuntu, so Clem and the rest of the Mint team have taken on the not-inconsiderable burden of packaging Chromium in traditional deb format. We do think Firefox, which continues to be the default in Mint, is a better browser, however. Chromium might be less Google-ey than Chrome, but it’s naive to think it’s entirely free of Mountain View’s jiggery-pokery.
A standard install of Mint is pretty darn secure, but we’ve got some tips to make it even more so in our Fortress Linux feature. Check that out to learn about home directory encryption, PGP and all sorts of other things that Mint can do for you and your defences.