Linux Mint 20.2
Jonni Bidwell is running low on mint metaphors and time, but the promise of some budget mojito mix expedited this review.
Jonni Bidwell is running low on mint metaphors, but the promise of some budget mojito mix expedited this review.
Well, it’s quite the Mint-fest this issue, what with it being on the cover, the disc, Jonni’s virtual machines and (as always) Effy’s laptop. Why all this attention? For a start we’ve always liked Mint, and, spoiler alert, this outing does nothing to change that. Next is that there are some nice under-the-bonnet changes with this release that we think you should know about.
Before you get excited though, there’s not much in terms of groundbreaking features this release; it’s more a continuation of the bold course set out a half dozen or so releases ago. In that time we’ve seen the introduction of user-friendly system roll-backs, ever-improving Nvidia Optimus support, HiDPI simplicity and so many nice tweaks and touches to make this list uncomfortably long if we were to continue. We’ve also seen further distancing from Ubuntu, through the disabling of the Snap Store, and, to remediate this, Linux Mint taking on packaging duties for Chromium.
Back in February, lead developer Clement Lefebvre – backed by statistics from search data – railed at users not applying updates in a timely fashion, and in particular the reported 30 per cent of users still running Mint 17. That version went EOL nearly three years ago, so anyone running it on a networked device is at serious risk. As it happened, our machine was still running Mint 20 (supported, like the whole rest of the 20.x series, until 2025) but the update tool enables you to jump straight to Mint 20.2. That went without a hitch for us, in part because there’s a nice document that outlines the upgrade on the website.
In an attempt to make updates more visible, the Update Manager (which for a long time only gave you a red dot to notify of updates) will now be much more vocal if updates aren’t applied for more than two days. This strikes a nice balance, improving user’s security (Firefox in particular is updated frequently) without being an unnecessary nuisance. Notifications are only shown for security and kernel updates by default, but it’s easy to customise this, as well as the frequency of package list refreshes and notifications.
Automatic updates are also possible, though disabled by default because otherwise you might find yourself suddenly having to restart due to a background update (to Systemd, for example) making things inconsistent. A large warning tells you to make sure to have Timeshift configured for regular snapshots if you enable auto-updating. It’s also possible to turn on auto updates for Flatpaks and all the flavours of Cinnamon Spices (applets, extensions and desklets). Having Flatpaks update in the background shouldn’t cause any problems, and when Spices are updated all you’ll see is a transient notification and a hint of display flicker.
If you’ve ever had to rename a whole lot of files, you’ll know that it can be tedious. You might also have taken matters into your own hands, sed-ing and grep-ing and regular expressioning through piped directory listings, in
which case we hope you recover soon.
One of many things we like about Pop!_OS is the bulk rename function (available through the File Manager).
It might not offer metadata-based renaming, but its simple search and replace and incremental numbering covers an awful lot of use cases. So it’s nice to see the introduction of Bulky, a similar utility in Mint 20.2. Select a bunch of files in Nemo, and Bulky is available from the right-click menu. It can do search/replace, uniform insertion/removal and also case adjustment. Bulky can do regular expressions too – though we still haven’t tried to use them ever since that time a stray ‘/’ character renamed every file on our network to what looked like the ASCII shrug gone wrong. Merely shrug we most certainly did not.
Super search
It’s also possible to search inside local files from the Nemo file manager, but on older machines you might want to disable this. Indexing large directories can take significant resources. There’s a Sticky Notes application too, which will help anyone migrating from the paper alternative. We prefer to keep our Mint desktop clean so we can enjoy the fantastic wallpaper selection, though. The Warpinator utility, a simple tool for sending files around your network, has been updated. There’s also an unofficial Android port (available on F-Droid and the Google place) so you can easily transfer files from your phone, though you may prefer to use KDE Connect.
New in Mint 20.2 is Cinnamon 5.0. As is common for open source projects (and confusing for pretend tech journalists), the major version bump doesn’t really imply groundbreaking changes. Cosmetically, excepting some user-facing changes to a few applets, it looks much like it did in 20.1. A few memory-leaking bugs have been fixed in Cinnamon 5.0 so you might notice a decreased memory footprint, and hopefully find it even more responsive than the previous outing.
If you missed the update back in March, you’ll notice there’s now an option to restart Cinnamon if (despite memory-leak plugs) it still starts guzzling memory. This is possibly not the most elegant solution, but there’s anecdotal evidence that in some configurations – none that the Linux Mint team or we could reproduce – Cinnamon still has a RAM addiction.
Overall this is an excellent release and we strongly recommend anyone running Mint 20 or 20.1 to upgrade immediately. Mint makes it easy to roll back if something goes wrong, so you really have no reason not to. And for those still running unsupported editions, please upgrade: Clem is really worried and you don’t want to worry Clem, do you?