CUSTOMISE MINT 2O!

Linux Mint is fantastic, but it’s also very flexible. Jonni Bidwell reveals how to make it your own

Linux Mint continues to go from strength to strength, as you’ll know if you’ve already had a play with the latest 20.2 release. If not, what are you waiting for? Fire up that there LXFDVD and witness the, er, Mint-ness forthwith. Or check out our thorough review on page 26. See, now you want to install it, don’t you? And that is just the beginning of the adventure. One of the things that makes Mint so cool is its configurability. It’s often said (by us) that Mint is an ideal beginner’s distro, and it turns out it’s also ideal (we say) for beginners to tinker with. The flagship Cinnamon desktop can be transformed not just with swishy effects and colourful themes, but with all kinds of extensions, applets and desklets (collectively known as ‘spices’ in Cinnamon parlance). And MATE and Xfce, the desktops featured in other editions of Mint, are equally seasonable. But we can do better than that: why not mix it up and install a whole new desktop environment? We’ll show you how to install the outstanding KDE Plasma, we’ll even show you how to make it work with the state of the art Wayland display protocol.

If you like things slimline, we’ll show you how to go minimal with the featherweight Sway desktop, again powered by Wayland. Sway is based on the i3 window manager, popular with power users and those who cannot abide desktop bloat. We’ll have you doing everything in the terminal and tiling like a pro in no time.

And just so no one gets hurt, we’ll start with a handy reminder about how you can use Timeshift to easily undo any desktoprelated mishaps.