OTHER EDITIONS

The main text covers the Cinnamon edition, but the other two flavours (MATE and Xfce) are well worth your attention. Both of these desktops are a little lighter than Cinnamon, but we still wouldn’t recommend using them with less than a gigabyte of RAM. In our testing the Xfce edition had the smallest memory footprint, but only by a whisker. For reference, Cinnamon used around 750MB, MATE weighed in at 600MB, and Xfce scored a slimline 550MB. Don’t read too much into those numbers though; fire up a web browser on any of them and open couple of popular websites, and you’ll soon see your memory usage skyrocket into the gigabytes.

the newest MATE 1.26 isn’t included in this Mint. That’s a shame, but something to look forward to in Mint 20.3. Mint Xfce includes the latest 4.16 edition of the desktop, released back in December. Xfce 4.18 is probably a long way off, but we’re still looking forward to it.

There’s another, lesser-known, edition of Mint too – Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). If you have 32-bit hardware this is the only version you can install, but if you want to learn more about Debian (or don’t like Ubuntu) then this is well worth checking out too. It is only available in Cinnamon flavour, but it’s easy to switch that out for something more lightweight. See the Customise Mint feature for some pointers. There’s no new release of LMDE this outing, but now that Debian 11 is out hopefully we won’t have to wait too long.