LINUX Unplugged - 339: The Mint Mindset

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

We get into the Linux Mint mindset after years away and share our take on Cinnamon's many improvements. Plus news that'll have knock-on effects for the rest of the year, and more. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

You know, the problem with smartwatches is having notifications buzz my wrist just really isn't enough. I wish there was a way a guy could have them right up in his face, right in his peepers, Wes. Oh, well, Bosch has a solution for you with their new smart glasses. You're probably tired of having to see everyone in the meeting or who you're even talking to or around in the city. Yeah, I mean, you can totally see when I'm glancing down at my smartphone. It's so inconvenient. Good thing these new smart glasses use a tiny laser array that paints images directly onto your retina. And they have got a really corporate generic video that shows you getting horrible notifications about really unimportant things right on your eyeballs.

Yeah, I mean, just imagine like whatever mundane texts that you get, notifications, emails popping up directly in your vision. These are also the ugliest peepers I've ever seen. I mean, I appreciate they're racking a lot of tech into this, but it seems like no coincidence that two hours before we started recording this here podcast, Google announced that you can get their latest AR glasses for direct purchase. You don't have to be like a special qualifying business anymore. And a big difference there, the Bosch versions, well, those you have to get custom fitted. Not so for Google.

No, but you know, Bosch has that huge developer ecosystem and that app store that's world famous for making all that money. So I'm sure it's going to work out real good. Hello, friends, and welcome in to Linux Unplugged episode 200, no, 339. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Not going to lie, Wes, it all kind of blurs together. Although I am kind of weirdly excited about 340, because you know what I realized? It's not every episode that it's been 10 episodes.

No. No. In fact, it's only one out of 10. So speaking of things that don't happen too often, this week, we're taking a look at Linux Mint, the latest Linux Mint, which by my rough math hasn't happened since episode 100. And I had a real moment where I thought, geez, it's been way too long. This is still a super popular distribution.

And I wanted to give it a real fair shake. So I said, I'm going all in. I put it here on the production systems for this episode. You're running it right now. Yeah. So we'll give you our take on the absolute latest Linux Mint, some new developments that are going on there, as well as our community news, follow-up

and feedback and all those goodies. But before we go any further, I gotta say time-approved greetings to that mumble room. Hello, virtual lug, time-appropriate greetings. Hello! I'm still flabbergasted by this earlier Tuesday showing. We've really got a great force.

You know, like I thought for sure when we went to noon on Tuesdays that nobody would show up, but this has just been awesome. So thank you, everybody. We have a bunch of people in the quiet listening to Tyler. It's great to see you. It's been forever since you've made it for an episode. You're here for a special one, my friend. Glad to be here. All right. Well, let's get into some big news. It's going to really shape the community. I think we've all been kind of waiting for this shoot to drop. And this last week, it was announced that IBM's CEO was stepping down. Welcome back. We've got some breaking news on IBM. And that news is that in April, chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty will step down as the CEO role, at least and remain chairman

Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty will step down as the CEO role, at least, and remain chairman temporarily. Of course, been CEO since 2012, been at the company for some 40 years. Before that, the new CEO that will take over is the current head of the cloud and cognitive software business. That's Arvind Krishna, who's also seen as quite instrumental behind the acquisition. I want to pause here for a second because this has been a common narrative now. Oh, this was really the guy behind the acquisition. So if you think that Red Hat purchase is a good idea, this is your guy. Which is, I don't know, maybe that's true. Maybe it's at least partially true because he is directly involved with their cloud stuff.

Right, and that's a lot of where Red Hat's value is coming from. But under Ramidi's reign, they acquired 65 different companies, mostly small ones. And of course, the biggest was that $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. Now, listen how they're positioning this, though. I paused the clip because I think this is extremely telling. The market has reacted very positively, and this is from a market analyst show. Red Hat, James Whitehurst, who was the CEO of Red Hat, will also be elected to the board

and become IBM president in part of this process. But quite a significant move in the share price, Mike, after hours. Of course, it's underperformed significantly, but up 5% on this news of the transition to a cloud leader. Did you hear right there? Because the guy was over talking at the end, they're positioning this as a transition to a cloud leader, which is, that's a big statement. Do you just get to say that? Is that how it works? We're becoming a cloud leader.

Apparently the market, their stock price is up. So this all will actually go down on April 6th. That's when this transition happens. And you heard in there, the other big part of this is Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, will become IBM's president on the same day. I mean, this does seem like a big recognition that Red Hat and some of the roles that it plays, the industries it's in, kind of need to be the direction that IBM goes and

transforms itself to. There's a lot of speculation, too, when that acquisition went down that people were thinking maybe Jim would eventually be running IBM. Right. This is up there. I mean, it's very, very much

in the tradition of IBM to promote from within. Krishna has been at IBM since 1990. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois. He's been a senior vice president at IBM since 2015,

and he is a leader in IBM's cloud computing business division since 2017. Technical background, has been around the business. I mean, that's not a bad candidate. And he's not too unfamiliar with the whole open source and Red Hat scene either. I found a clip of him doing a keynote at Red Hat Summit in 2013. Good evening, everyone. So, you know, it's always a tough act to follow. Not quite a teenager, but you go from 20 years to 102.

So Jim talked a lot about innovation, about openness, and I think you'll hear quite a bit of the same from us, as well as some of IBM's observations on the paradigm shift about openness, and I think you'll hear quite a bit of the same from us, as well as some of IBM's observations on the paradigm shift that's happening in the world and how actually open and the innovation that results from open helps all of us deal with that paradigm shift. Of course, I'll have the entire keynote linked in the show notes,

but I just play that little introduction there because I think it's interesting to see him running a keynote at Red Hat Summit in 2013, and now we come full circle in 2020. Post-acquisition, it's been a year, and their CEO is going up to president, and he's running the company. And he was on stage talking about how open source is important for innovation in our industry. Who knows long-term how this guy will play out? He's got a massive ship.

He's got it right now. Absolutely. But maybe this means good things for the future. Help of Red Hat as we knew it. Yeah. And he seems like a sharp individual who is very well-spoken and able to answer a lot of questions

that the media throw at him. I watched a couple of different analyst shows that he went on over the last few years just to get a sense of the guy. And he can immediately overwhelm the reporter sitting at the desk. There was one of them, and I didn't link it, but there was one of them where he starts giving an answer, and the reporter didn't realize they're still on the wide shot. And he looks over at the co-anchor and just goes, oh my gosh, and he rolls his whole face.

That is fantastic. And then when they come back, he's trying to recompose and he's trying to grasp what the man is telling him. So he's a very intelligent individual, obviously, as well. So I think, and that's something I wanted to draw attention to, is traditionally these leaders at IBM haven't been from an extremely technical background. In fact, it's been the exact opposite.

They've come from more like the sales background or the business growth background. He's actually coming, I mean, he's got a degree in engineering. He's worked in the engineering area. So he's actually got an engineering background, which is a little unusual for the last few CEOs. Yeah, even heads IBM's research unit, among other duties. Yeah, so who knows? Who knows? But it's one of those things that I think I wanted to touch on

because I feel like it will have long-term knock-on effects. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a marker of the next stage for IBM. Yeah. And a lot of pressure on that new guy to show results in services in cloud. Got to show results. Now, let's talk about

something else that's showing some results. We talked about this one a little while ago, too, although not as long as Linux Mint. Systemd HomeD is merged right in.

Now, of course, it's not in a Systemd that's on a distribution near you yet, but it will be coming to future versions of Systemd. It is in the 245 release and up. Yeah, if you don't recall, and you might not because we only talked about it, I mean, just recently back in episode 320,

Systemd HomeD makes it easier to support things like migratable home directories, self-containment within home directories, better password and encryption handling, and other modern features. Now, you should probably check out 320 if you want very in-depth details. Yeah, we've got some clips from Leonard's talk introducing it. It's kind of surprising how fast this has been merged. But, you know, as we mentioned, it's an optional feature that's just landing upstream.

So it'll be a while before we see any distros taking advantage of it, I'm sure. And think of it as like two major pieces. You have systemd, homed, which is the server for managing the home directories and user accounts. And then you have a user space tool for interacting with this new service, which is, surprise, surprise, called HomeCTL. Home Cuddle, isn't that? That's one version. You got to have a new cuddle if you have a new server.

I don't like that. I don't like that at all. I do not like that. I like that even less than I like calling QT cute. And I hate that. So we're not – and it's one of the reasons we're not even doing the cute story today because I just hate saying cute.

Anyways, you know how whenever you talk about things that Apple has open sourced and hasn't screwed up and then, after you talk about WebKit, eventually you get down to CUPS. You're like, oh yeah, remember they bought CUPS? The common Unix printing server? Yeah, that one. Well, more than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source code and its lead developer, Michael Sweet, he has left Apple.

CUPS's lead developer is moving on. Yeah, I guess this announcement came just before Christmas. He'll be taking a break and then plans to begin forming a new business with his wife. That's great. Yeah, and I mean, he's already been busy. Already since leaving Apple this month, Sweet went on to announce Lprint as a new label printer software package for Linux and macOS. Lprint is a print spooler designed for label printing on hardware like Dymo label makers.

Already, he's been quickly advancing Lprint with a 1.0 release on the horizon soon. Label printers are the bane of printing. So it's nice to see something that's... And it is sort of exactly one of those weird use cases where it's probably some horrible Windows program that you have to load just for this one machine and there would, of course, there's no Linux support, but hey, maybe now there is. I would like to see some sort of bracketed fight between you, Sweet, and Bacon. Payne, Sweet, and Bacon.

Which truly is the best DJ name? And I'd like to see some sort of bracketed... There'll have to be some contests, I think. I mean, Payne is very hard to beat. Bacon's good, and sweet is nice, but Payne is like an action hero name, I've always thought. So if you ever wanted to get into rock and roll, Wes Payne bringing you the hits. You should see my Matrix moves. Oh, I have Wes Payne.

I have indeed. So now we'll see what happens with cups. Will Apple promote from within or seek somebody outside to take over the reign? Will Apple decide that printing is so 1990 and then just remove it from its systems and print through the iCloud print service? Who knows? I don't think there is an iCloud print service. Maybe an Apple printer coming soon, huh? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it's going to be $1,000. Only print special paper. Yeah, it's going to be $1,000. And it'll only print special paper. Yeah. But very glossy. Very, very glossy. This last item here is just sort of acknowledging that we received a lot of different types of feedback, all really good, constructive feedback about our burnout discussion in a recent episode. And it seems like we kind of touched on something that's pretty universal, and we're left with a sense that there might be more we could do on this topic,

but I struggle to think of what something could be a genuine contribution to people that are struggling with burnout. Right, we kind of fell on the conversation, but it does seem like there might be more here, but what's the right format for this? And we talked about it in the context of open source and free software developers burning out, but from so many people we heard, it was all kinds of, like, sysadmins

and just all types, parents. I mean, all types. So we are looking for ideas at linuxonplug.com slash contact. Mostly I heard from people on Telegram and Twitter, which is great, because it was like, okay, we hit on something here. But then later when Wes and I wanted to kind of collate it all,

we realized it'd be probably pretty good if we got that stuff in email. Yeah, especially for things like suggestions for content. That makes it really easy to go find and reference. So that's LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact to do that. And I'm going to set a challenge for those of you that are feeling like you're too busy to do anything. You're burning out. I push you to do something. Enjoy it for a week, just

until the next episode. When something comes up, consider saying yes to it. Think of it as like you're forking your thought process for one week only. So it's not a lifestyle change. It's not something you have to commit to. But for a week, what I encourage you to do is break out of that narrative. If you're thinking to yourself, well, I wish I could, Chris, but I don't have that luxury. I'm too busy.

Yeah, big reports too, man. You're exactly who I'm talking to. You have to break that narrative. You have to get out of that. I got a couple of links about how glorification of business and being busy impacts the way we think about things and how we kind of frame these thoughts in our head.

I've got a link in the show notes for that. Creating the habit of not being busy or just another approach at habits. I'm doing this myself. I launched chrislast.com, which is a little side project with the Chris Last cast. You've got to come on there sometime, Wes. That sounds fun.

We'll talk about anything but Linux, anything we talk about on work. It's all just like all the other things. There's plenty of other sometime, Wes. Ooh, that sounds fun. We'll talk about anything but Linux. Anything we talk about on work. It's all just like all the other things. There's plenty of other things. Dogs. Ooh. You know I love dogs now. Well, I love my dog.

Anyways, so I'm doing that. I'm going to just do it for a little while. It's like a little side thing because podcasts I started as a hobby. Then it became my, now it's a career. And so now it was, well, I have to do it a certain way and a certain, like, you know, all these standards we've set up for ourselves.

Because of work. And I was like, well, what if I just wanted to have fun? Because that's still my preferred way to express myself. And I think that recognition is going to make this a lot more sustainable for me because I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. That's just it there, right? It's about sustainability.

When you're always, you know, when you don't make time for yourself, then you can't work sustainably. I've never even bothered to set up my own website before because I thought, I don't have time for that. Like, I got to put everything I have into these shows I'm doing every single day. Like, that's what I got to spend my attention on.

But then I realized, like, I was kind of robbing from Peter to pay Paul. And if I don't have some sort of creative outlet like that, it turns into just this total grind fest that I end up resenting and hating and not feeling motivated about. And it was just sort of a, it just took a little bit of a perspective shift. And that's why I really want to encourage people that if you're feeling burned out, do something that you first are resistant to and just try it for one week until the next episode. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But just think of it as forking your way of thinking or maybe setting a theme for a week.

I like that. And I mean, that's the thing. It's not easy. You got to be intentional about it. Yeah. And the moment you start thinking to yourself, I'm too busy for that. That's the moment to catch yourself and think,

or should I just try this for a bit and just go with it? Because what's the freaking worst that could happen? I'm already miserable. So give that a go. I don't know. We're getting a little meta, but it just, it touched me how much feedback we got. And I felt like, geez, this is something people are really struggling with. And it is something that I myself have cycles and cycles and cycles of experience with now over the years. And it, you know, it comes up in different ways. So maybe it's something we can help a little bit. Maybe that's something I'll do in my side stuff or something. I don't know.

In the meantime, I do know we got some housekeeping. Not a lot this week. I want to give a shout out to Mr. Cheesy Bacon. You might notice he's not here. He just went through, let's just say, a procedure I wouldn't want to go through. And he's recovering right now. Like a boss. Like a boss.

He showed up for his weekly meeting. We tried to kick him out and say go rest, but he was having none of it. So everybody send your get well vibes to Mr. Cheese Bacon. Shout out to Cheesy. We miss you, buddy, but we know you're here with us. And you can catch him on Telegram at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. That's been growing great. One of the things Cheesy helped us do along with our freaking amazing community

is implement some bots in some of these channels, so it's cut down on the spam, which has meant the actual genuine conversations have, it's amazing, have really blossomed in there. So, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram for that. And then, last but not least, if you like Linux, and you like to know what's going on in this

industry. I do. Do you? Yeah. Well, good news, Wes. You should check out Linux Headlines at linuxheadlines.show every single weekday. That's not like a really long sort of boring news show. Three minutes or less, Wes. Perfect. Three minutes or less. And it's a fantastic, well-researched breakdown that is vetted by the team before it gets published. So check that out at linuxheadlines.show every single weekday in three minutes or less. Now also publishing to the Jupyter Broadcasting YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. You'll see the most recent brunch with Brent over there.

Oh, yeah. So Brent just had an incredible brunch with Peter Adams. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he is the guy behind the Faces of Open Source project. What a great chat, because it's Brent, who's a photographer, talking with another photographer about how they both leverage their skills to promote and showcase open source. I loved it. That could have been a launch episode right there, Brent. Well, we're hoping to have many more of those coming up, so we'll have many launch episodes coming, maybe.

Yeah, a lot of good things in the brunch pipeline. Oh, I'm excited. People are really loving it. Extras.show for that. And you can look at the categories. There's ways to get feeds just for brunch. I mean, maybe one day you won't have to mess with that. But in the meantime, Extras.show, go catch that.

And it's also on the YouTube channel. Peter Adams, super fascinating guy, really well-known photographer in the open source community. And just a great talk. The two of you really hit it off, and I enjoyed the hell out of that. Xers.show or YouTube.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. That, my friends, is the total improv housekeeping. That wasn't too bad.

No, we got through it okay. So, you know what else is unique about episode 100, besides it being the last time we reviewed Linux Mint? You know what else is unique about episode 100 besides it being the last time we reviewed Linux Mint? You know what else is unique about that episode? I could be wrong, but I seem to recall it was Wes Payne's first episode. That's right. So that was also a post-barbecue episode. I wish we were barbecuing.

I mean, it's snowing outside, so it doesn't make sense, but I wish we were barbecuing. It's really kind of snaining right now. You know, it's snaining, not necessarily snowing. Yeah, this was a, that was a fun episode. And so we'll link that on the old notes keys if you're interested

in our previous take. At the time though, I was concerned that I didn't feel like it was something you could recommend because it just seemed more logical to go

with Ubuntu proper, which had canonical behind it, had hardware vendors in the marketplace, and had an obvious long-term support cycle that you could depend upon. That was one of my concerns about Mint back then. Which, how long, when was that?

I got to go look at the date, just so that we have a reference point here. That was back on July 7th, 2015. Linux Mint 17.2, I think we were talking about? Kernel 3.15? Yeah, 17.2. Yeah, you're right. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Anyways, I think those concerns did not bear out. Linux Mint has continued on. Right, I mean, because they don't have the same sort of control that Ubuntu does

because they're using so much of Ubuntu's packaging. But you're right. It's not like it's been a super unstable, we don't hear a lot of complaints from Linux Mint users. Right. And, you know, they recently received nearly 25, no, they did receive over $25,000 in a single month of donations. That's some pretty great support.

And they've just released their latest version last month, and they've just published a new set of updates to it. And we thought, all right, it's time to give 19.3 a go. It's been too long. Let's see what it's like. And so I wanted to get kind of a pulse from the audience type thing, because a lot of times I think people typecast Linux Mint as, oh, it's a good Windows replacement.

Or, you know, if you're new to Linux, you should use Linux Mint. And I hate that. I hate when we do that because every distro can be for anybody. It just depends on your approach. Sure, some distros have a much steeper ramp. But if you're well-read, willing to do your research, ask questions, you can basically do just about any dang distro going, no matter what your previous skill level is,

with some exceptions. So when I wanted to get a feel for why people in our audience were using Linux Mint, here's a little bit of what I got back when I asked. This comes from at Awup on Twitter. He says, I transitioned from Windows 10 to Mint after I failed to migrate from Windows 7, and I thought performance was too crappy on Windows 7.

I expected a bit of blowback from usability and other things arising from migrating to any Linux-based hashtag distro, but it's been quiet and it's been going for four weeks. Fine. So he did it because Windows 10 didn't upgrade properly for him. So he thought, well, screw this. That's great. I mean, yeah, why not? What upgrade properly for him. So he thought, well, screw this. That's great. I mean, yeah, why not? What you got is broke.

Dave writes in, I donate $15 a month because it allows me to do pretty much all of my work without getting in the way. I look forward to each new release instead of dreading updates. That's a nice property right there. And I got a couple of different forms of that that came in. nice property right there. And I got a couple of different forms of that that came in. The number one sentiment was it lets me do all of my work without getting in the way. And that's worth money to me.

That was what I noticed over and over and over again. That's actually something we talked about way back in episode 100 because they recently started rebasing on LTS 14.04 at the time. And that meant that you could finally upgrade Linux Mint without worrying that it would break.

It brought that level of stability. Right. That used to be a thing. I had completely forgotten about this. Alex wrote in a long time ago, different Alex than self-hosted Alex, but he wrote in, I've responded to him offline, but I wanted to read a bit of this because I thought this sort of also shows you a use case. I'm a university professor and I plan on organizing a new course for my students this fall. He's pretty excited about it. The title will be

something along the line of Introduction to Linux and Open Source Software in Geosciences. Some of the students have never used or installed Linux before. I've used Ubuntu for many years. Then last year, I switched to Debian and now back on Ubuntu and Pop! OS. This summer, I had some fun distro hopping. I tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu 1804, 1810, and 1904, OpenSUSE, Fedora, KDE, Neon, and finally, Linux Mint 19.1. That's some first-class distro hopping right there. It seriously was busy. After this experience, I switched to Linux Mint for a few weeks. My main reason was I needed a distro based on Ubuntu, my habit of command line use.

And I needed libraries in Ubuntu on Ubuntu, my habit of command line use, and I needed libraries in Ubuntu 18.04 for software that we develop. And finally, I needed the ability to use the same kernel as Ubuntu 19.04 due to trackpad problems on my Lenovo Carbon X1. I have to say that Linux Mint is the easiest for newbies. For example, installing Dropbox, Skype, Melody, and all kinds of things can be done with one click in the software center. The backup system snapshots option is fast and easy. This is something else that was echoed by a couple of people. It has been a year and I have not done a conventional backup.

Now I'm actually motivated to do so. So this snapshot system that they integrated, we got several people that wrote in and liked this. Like Jeff here said, you asked for opinions about TimeShift. I too had concerns based on the horrible experiences of system restore in Windows. That's what I was like, is it like as bad as Windows restore? However, TimeShift has twice worked successfully on my Mint systems to roll back problematic updates. I was so impressed that I installed it on my Arch machine and I have used it after I had a problematic update on Arch just a few days ago.

Time shift appears to be the real deal, and now I consider it vital for any new system I build. Well, that's a heck of an endorsement. Yeah. Yeah, so you can see there's things about Mint that go beyond the Cinnamon, XFCE, what type of desktop environment that people seem to be really drawn to,

so much so that they're willing to put their hard-earned money right where it matters. And you can see it. I mean, they've got over $25,000 in donation. So now we're looking at 19.3, which is the latest release, just updated recently. There's XFCE, Cinnamon, and Mate spins. Because I didn't have a lot of time and I wanted to go all in, I decided to try out the Cinnamon edition again

because I look at that as sort of the premier flagship mint. And you know, it's the desktop environment they're the most directly involved in. It's pretty great. Along with these desktop environment options, you have celluloid instead of X player, Gnote instead of Tomboy, and system reports, which is able to detect some kind

of typical problems and then give you suggestions. And there's almost complete high DPI support. Plus a lot more in here, of typical problems and then give you suggestions. And there's almost complete, almost complete, high DPI support, plus a lot more in here, including a more modern version of the Linux kernel. And this new system tray fix that seems to be kind of working that they've introduced to try to get all the icons from different apps at the right size crammed down

in the corner like you're used to back in the day. And everything just worked. Problem is that some apps are not still working, like NextCloud and NixNote don't work and the HP printer demon little app thing doesn't show up down there. In fact, it can even cause the HP GUI just to crash altogether.

Oh, yikes. Yeah, so it's not perfect, but they're aware of those issues. But they're trying to just address some of those things that I think users come to expect. They're trying to just address some of those things that I think users come to expect. Now, as far as my biases when I went into this, my opinion of Cinnamon in the past is it's really nice. It's a lot like a sweet spot between Gnome and Plasma, but it just misses some refinement.

Just misses like things are a little unstable. Things don't seem quite finished. It's not like seeing its full potential i do not feel that way in my usage so far this this release feels like it's carrying forward years of refinement now and And this version of, so this is Cinnamon 4.45 that ships in this, and the performance is great. The experience, I'd say, feels classy. Feels classy. Feels refined. Within seconds, I had my theme set up the way I like, I had my icons changed over, and of course, Linux Mint still feels a little bit like one of those everything including the kitchen sink distros to a degree. And so all the themes and icon styles and everything I might want were already pre-installed. So I was ready to go. Firefox ready to go.

The panel was always my biggest niggle in Cinnamon. And now it feels like one of the most solid panels out there. I don't think I've really used Linux Mint since then. You know, maybe checked in here or there. And it feels like a whole new panel. It's minimal without being too minimal. Feels very clean. And honestly, I was very surprised by how snappy everything felt.

And they've brought forward the feature I like the most from the Plasma panel is that's where you go into a dedicated edit mode where the UI actually reflects that you're in a mode to change the panel. And it kind of, it has color theme matched like highlights that it does, hotspot areas that it lights up. And you can toggle that mode. And so it's locked in when you're not in that mode. And it takes up the minimum amount of space and it just looks really good and it functions exactly like you'd expect. Everything's where you'd want it.

When I sat down and started using Cinnamon, it was like I had been using it since episode 100. Like I never stopped. There has not been a moment yet where I've been hunting for something. Everything's where I expect it. It took me seconds to get my displays. I have multiple displays on this system, get them working. Absolutely think this has gotten to a point of refinement. I really do.

I don't know if it's for me still. What do you think about that? Well, one thing that struck me is, you know, it definitely looks a lot more polished and nice, but it's not, you know, in the latest Ubuntu, and I'm sure 2004, Ubuntu's got a pop with Yaru looking really great and sort of the bright colors, the oranges and the purples.

Especially on a high DPI screen, it's just a beautiful desktop these days. It's gorgeous. Linux Mint doesn't quite have that, but I don't think in a bad way. No. It's just very... Understated?

Understated, yeah. But it gets out of your way. It's not trying to capture your attention with itself. But it also now, I think with that polish, means it also doesn't have some of those distracting flaws. So like you said, you just sit down and you get right to work. You just get to work. You're right. And it's low

key. It's a low key visual style. That's what it is. Even the grub menu, which looks nice. Not a ton of contrast. Yeah. And you know, you hear in the when people are writing in, what we saw echoed was it just gets out of my way and i i wouldn't be surprised if there is a visual element of it's not flashing at me now you know i say all that i kind of like the new looks too see i'm the kind of guy who can

appreciate wobbly windows and i can appreciate a regular setup where everything snaps to a to a spot in the screen. So I have a pretty wide range of tolerance, and I can generally find something I like about all of them. This Cinnamon setup is a little cliche to say, but if I had a family member or a friend that was on Windows 7 right now or Windows 8 and didn't want to go to 10 or, God forbid, Vista, I would seriously consider Cinnamon. This is nice.

I think the thing is, it works like you would expect. It's just a very intuitive interface, especially I think to Windows users. Nemo is a fine looking file manager. And I found the whole experience to be just sort of friendly. You know, the software was easy to find and install. Backups are made quite available. It feels like it's been thought of for people coming and starting to use the system. I want to jump on that for just a second. It's all right there, like boot repair menu, where you can just check your bootloader

and see if there's something wrong with it and repair it. Backup is just called system backup. The driver manager is just called driver manager. And when you log in the first time, it asks, oh, you might need to set up some of your hardware. Here's the driver manager. Now, it did manage to think that my Intel Wi-Fi needed a thing and didn't think the device was working.

But the flip side, for whatever reason, joining the Wi-Fi seems way faster on Linux Mint than it has under GDE Neon. I wonder if, I mean, they're using network manager, I assume, right? Yeah. I was also very impressed just setting it up to get installed

because on my ThinkPad here, I've got a whole bunch of distros installed. And I like to test things out and see how well does the installer cope with having other Linux distributions there? Does it detect it? Does it handle it right? Does it offer?

It did very well. It found all my existing users. It offered to sort of automatically shrink a partition and add itself in there without overwriting stuff and when I mess things up and you know I'm disappointed to say that because it's based on 18.04 it still has that bug where if you try to put

grub on XFS it doesn't work because it doesn't install the XFS module and it can't find grub reinstalled with ext4 and it detected that there was Linux Mint there and was just perfectly ready to, oh, do you just want to reinstall right over where you just installed Mint? That's good. It's perfect. Not too complicated, easy to sort out.

When you first launch their update manager, it says Linux Mint recommends you set up automated system snapshots and apply all available updates. This way, your computer is always secure and you can go back in time and recover from any potential regression. And then it gives you, these are the three types of updates, security updates, software updates, and system snapshots. Pretty nice. Brent, do you have some semi-recent experience with Mint yourself? That's probably a really accurate way of describing it.

I actually was a huge Mint user for many, many years before. Oh, really? user for many many years um before oh really yeah it was you know if anyone knows my history i i kind of moved from the mac environment to uh zubuntu but after a year or two moved to mint for all of many of the reasons that you're describing it's super user-friendly cinnamon was a really nice interface and still is um and so I probably used it for like three, four years and recommended it to tons of people and got lots of people on it. Uh, and that was right up until I'd say about for me personally, two and a half years ago, but I've been interacting with friends and family with it up till last year. Um, and I kept running into these small little issues that were basically based around just some of the software being held back a little bit.

So part of their model is to have a little bit of an older kernel based on an LTS that's a little bit older as a trade-off to that sustainability, right? Stability, I should say. And that ended up causing some problems, you know, that for me, okay, I'm maybe pushing the envelope a little bit compared to, you know, new users, but it was even little things like running into issues with KDE Connect, which I suggest for people who have Android phones to do backups and access their files and stuff like that. And things with NextCloud that it was just, I don't know, these little tiny bugs that are often referred to as, you know, those paper cuts that just add up. So even though I loved that distro for many years, it was just it just kind of started getting there where I was just all these little frustrations added up. And and that's kind of what what caused me to move away.

So it sounds to me almost like maybe, you know, what Wes described that maybe that hasn't quite been totally surmounted yet. Maybe it's just based on their philosophies of being a little bit slower to have those compromises. It makes me think there too, Brent. I mean, way back in episode 100, I'd been a regular Mint user. of being a little bit slower to have those compromises. It makes me think there too, Brent. I mean, way back in episode 100, I'd been a regular Mint user. It was the distro I was using on my workstation at work.

I wonder if there's like, you know, I think Mint is still great for a lot of use cases, but it's not, I'm still, even having this great experience right now, using it and running it right now, I'm still not, I'm not going to switch to it. It just doesn't, as a sort of advanced tinkerer Linux user, it's not the right fit for me. And in a way that I don't feel necessarily about Ubuntu.

I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's the server use case, but it just feels like what Linux Mint is doing, I respect and I like and I enjoy, but I don't need. I think you just nailed it. I think that's exactly what it is. Because on the desktop side, you can run an Ubuntu interim release that has much fresher packages. Right. And on the server side, you're not going to run Linux Mint. And you do want something that is of a more stable cadence.

And for us, Mint just doesn't fit within that spectrum. However, if I was using this as a research station to write papers and to collect information on the web, or if I was using this as a way to terminal into systems, or if I wanted to deploy a terminal services environment, I might go with the Monte edition, but you know what I mean? Like there are use cases I absolutely could see for Mint where people would fit within the spectrum use case of it,

and that's clearly bared out by the donations. And I picture it not as newbies, which is, I think, probably a portion of them. So I think it's fair to say newbies like Mint. And it seems to be that there's some cultural channels that people find themselves in that sort of push them towards Mint if they're new. But I also think it's people that just want to get their damn work done. And I think there's way more of them than we give credit to. Yes, if you don't need to have the latest desktop software,

you're not trying to go find the latest version of KDE Connect that has the feature you heard about that you want to try. You just want to make sure that you can get LibreOffice and you feel like your computer is secure and you've got the science tools you need or whatever, it's perfect for that. It seems like to me Mint too is still that distribution that promises to shave off a few rough edges that I think you could argue are there or not. So I'll give you an example. When you launch the update manager again, this is because it's just, it's such a

great, their update manager is such a great personification of the distribution's philosophy. So it's such a great way to just totally encapsulate the distributions outlook on things. So when you open it, first it gives you that advisory I read earlier. Then it says, hey, why don't you use a local mirror? Hit this button here and go get a local mirror. So that way you get the fastest downloads. Totally possible on any distro, right? But they're shaving off that 5% extra effort you'd have to

take to go copy-paste to the command line to do it yourself. Just making it right there up in front and discoverable as a result. Right. That's a huge thing that we don't give credit to. Then when you're in there, in the settings, after you've said, yeah, I want to do that, they have other things in here that I think even if they're not necessary, promise the user that it's solving problems for

you that you don't want to have to manage. And I think we can't understate how important that is, because the operating system is supposed to manage the computer for you so you can get your work done. And that's kind of what Mint is promising here. Like when you go to the maintenance thing, you can do things like purge residual configuration or add missing GPG keys or remove a foreign package or downgrade a foreign package with these buttons in the software source's application. They're all things you could do with apt on the command line.

Right, but it's that model that is more similar to how some of the other operating systems do it and I think it fits in with a lot of models people already have. And by putting it in a section called maintenance, the implication is they're handling something for you that needs to be maintained on the machine that likely other distributions aren't. And that has to be valuable to some people when they see that.

When they see something out there that looks like, okay, it's solving problems for me. And they've done that across a series of applications on Mint. And I think when you just kind of look at that sort of, that one, when you take that one thing in isolation and look at it, there's a lot to unpack there. And what I see is a distribution that promises to get out of your way, let you get your work done, and save 5% of your time here and there a couple of times a month. And when you use something over a year or two, and every couple of months, or every couple of weeks really,

it's saving you 5% a time versus maybe if you were using Ubuntu proper. I would see building a real fondness for that. And I could see really appreciating the value that brings because there's nothing more valuable than time. And I could see really appreciating the value that brings because there's nothing more valuable than time. And I could see wanting to contribute to keeping that going. And there's something great about it being an indie project that is obviously riding on the shoulders of giants,

no doubt about it, but has also created something beloved themselves. Yeah, I mean, they've been around for a long time. They've survived a lot of changes in the desktop Linux ecosystem. I used to be very concerned about Clem's staying power, but I think time has spoken. And here they are, still cranking it out. By my account from a software,

I have no idea how they're doing morally or how they're holding up as a team. But from an output side, this is the best looking mint I've ever seen. And that's not a small thing. I can genuinely appreciate the value of this distribution now. Even if it's not for us

it doesn't fit within our use case spectrum. Isn't it great that we have like an ecosystem that this is even possible? That Canonical and Debian and all the ecosystems of open source

and free software that Mint, they have an idea, the team has a vision for how the desktop can be and they're actually able to build that. Yeah, and I think if you want something that you can stick on there and run for a while, it's great for that. Now, for me, it's funny, that's the same use case I attribute to a Manjaro or an Arch,

is I stick it on a machine and I just leave it, and it just goes and goes and goes for years, much in the same way Mint does, but solving two different problems. Arch is solving the, I like to tinker with software, I like to have the latest stuff, and it's solving Brent's problem of older things on the system are incompatible with newer projects

that you want to do. It solves both those problems differently. It's fascinating to me. Like if you were able to just roll with what comes loaded on Mint forever, you'd be satisfied as long as 19.3 is supported. And on Arch, you look back and then you go, oh, how can you do that? You know, how can, it's just so funny. It's so funny that we're using the same fundamental

systems. We have the same fundamental philosophies and yet the two are as far apart in terms of workflow as you can get. And it's a real crazy thing to me. I'm not keeping it on here. I'm going to go back into Kubuntu. It does make me think it might be, you know, I sort of forgot about Cinnamon, I'll be honest. It almost makes me think it's like the XFCE I could actually use. Yeah, I do feel like I need to give Cinnamon another crack because I have experienced in the past

when I load Cinnamon up on other distros, it's not as nice. That is one. I don't know. I haven't tried it for a while. It probably deserves to be tried. And if you've got a spin, there's that Ubuntu Cinnamon Edition, right? You know, you've got a spin or something that is designed to run it, you know, where they've put a little effort into making that old cinnamon taste good.

Yeah, you've got to go with cinnamon. You've got to go with cinnamon and mint. You know, there's like a flavor theme going on here. Maybe a mixed drink. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Linux Mint is a bit of a mixed drink. I did not get a chance to try the XFCE edition.

And that kind of burns me because the other kind of consistent bit of feedback we got in when I asked about this was it's one of the best XFCE implementations out there. I think we have some homework, though. Yeah, yeah, we could. Yeah, we could do that. Because I did grab both ISOs, which we don't talk

about this anymore, but some projects still are not great at delivering ISOs. Other projects like Mint, though, these ISOs rock down,

like boom. They had a lot of handy mirrors over the torrent, plenty of seats. Yeah, I grabbed the torrent and I think they must have had a CDN web seat on that thing or something because I downloaded that entire ISO in seconds.

I don't even think it took a minute. I mean, it was ridiculous. So, you know, it's funny because sometimes you go try, even now in 2020, you go download a Linux distro to review it and you're getting like the worst download. You're like, oh yeah, it is still hard to move these large files around sometimes. But they feel really polished. As long as you don't go to the website.

We kid, guys. We kid. We joke. It's mostly fine. And I'd love to know what your thoughts are. Let me know at ChrisLAS on the old Twitters if you've given it a go. And yes, we did look into the Debian edition. They do have a new release that's in the works right now you know i have uh used the debian edition which is kind of their rolling version

if you will uh which was my attempt before moving to arch to kind of get the best of both worlds and it was pretty slick for a while and then it broke very catastrophically so um mileage may vary that was a little while ago but it's really cool that they're offering that sort of testing style of release that just kind of rolls and rolls and rolls. Smart. It's smart to keep that going, too. I think Brent's hooked on rolling.

Yeah. That could be a podcast name, Hooked on Rolling. Because I'll tell you what, although people wouldn't know what kind of rolling you're talking about outside the Linux industry. Got to listen to find out. That's true. Probably would get a big audience because of it.

Yeah, I think it's the classy distro. I think it truly is. It's like the classy distro. It's an understated classy distro that doesn't go out of its way to be super flashy, but once you start using it, you're like, oh, there's some charm here. It's understated, but there's some charm.

If you haven't hopped to it for a while, it's worth a visit. Really, I think it is. 19.3, it's only been out for a little bit, and so it's gotten some fresh updates now. The one thing we didn't really talk about much is the system report tool that they launched, which will help you if you have like missing language packs or something's not configured correctly. And that's also something that is hard to appreciate when you know how to fix those things. But I think, you know, this is bringing back those feelings of like when I was, I wouldn't even call myself a newbie.

I've been using Linux for a while, but I just didn't understand the Linux desktop, you know, like I could do change, you know, move around the command line, but there's a lot going on, Dbus, all the things that make up the Linux desktop. And you're right. Just having things that are friendly, that pop up, that sort of say like, look, we got this.

There's a way that you can do it. Yeah. We'll make it easy. So check it out. It doesn't have to be a new users only distro. I think it's for people that have used Linux for years, but just want a nice work environment. What's that for you, Mumble Room?

I'm curious, anybody want to chime in with their workhorse distribution of choice? Neon, without a doubt. Steve says neon, for sure. Neon has been really solid, I agree. What about you, Byte? Budgie. Ah, Budgie. Very nice.

I could definitely see that. TechMav, do you have one? I'm on neon on the main rig, and then on the Piper Pro, I'm using Manjaro with i3. What a showing for Neon. Yeah. Yeah, have you all been doing it since the Plasma Challenge forever ago, or is it just something you stumbled upon recently? I've been on Neon for quite some time.

It's rare I switch away from it. That's great. Plasma Challenge for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, since you reviewed it, I've been using it since then. Yeah, it has. I've stuck with a lot of people. And one of these machines in the studio is still Neon, too.

I just can't keep track anymore. Tyler, what about you? Do you have a workhorse distro of choice? I run Kubuntu on both my machines, but it's so customized that if I need something quick and ready to go, I'll actually go with the Ubuntu GNOME. Sure, sure. Am I mistaken, or has everybody said Plasma with the exception of i3 as the primary driver? I think everybody had like... Wow.

Yeah. Whoa. No. No? Okay. Oh, Budgie. Right, Budgie. Budgie, yeah. Right, Budgie. I had Budgie. You know, Tyler's comment there does kind of make me think

one thing we didn't list here in Cinnamon's favor is, much like GNOME, you can just work with the defaults. I mean, you customize it a little bit, but I don't even think you need to, right? Like, if you just needed to get some work done. Yeah, and I like GTK apps, too. They look good. The theming's well done.

I like how much you don't want to let yourself admit that. I do like Plasma, and I love stupid QT. You can like both. I do, and that's my problem, because I'm torn between lovers. As soon as I spend too much time with one, the other says they're getting jealous of us. They don't have a lot of needs. Yeah, they do, including resources, I tell you what. Anyways, that's it for today, I think.

I think that's all we'll have on Mint. It was nice to visit it again. Any thoughts? Do you think we should revisit maybe in like another two releases or something? We shouldn't let it go so long. Right. No, I think the next major version at least, or maybe the next time there's a release of the Debian version.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That's sooner than later. I wouldn't mind looking at the Debian version, actually. We'll put that on the possibility list. The only challenge with that is we're coming up on Fest season. Hardcore. Fest season 2004 is right around the corner. Right now, we are in the early stage.

Well, just past early stages. Mid-early. Mid-early planning stages of Linux Fest Northwest. I have been looking at barbecue rentals. stages of LinuxFest Northwest, I have been looking at barbecue rentals. So I found for like a hundred and something bucks you can get a three-day rental.

It might be a hundred and something bucks a day. And you can get a three-day rental of a big long barbecue. And I'm thinking that's the way to go for LinuxFest. Are we going to need to get like a whole pig then too? Oh man. Or at least a lot of brats. You know, get a lot of brats in there and get them up to that? Oh, man. Or at least a lot of brats.

You know, get a lot of brats in there and get them up to that front of the line. Brats to the front of the line. And we just got the new batteries installed, so we were off last week. While you were gallivanting around, electrifying yourself. Yeah. Got 600 amp hours of lithium ion batteries installed and 1.2 kilowatts of solar installed on the roof. That's so cool. 0.2 kilowatts of solar installed on the roof. That's so cool.

So the Lady Jupes is now a mobile battle station, a mobile workstation with multiple internet connections. And of course, this is all part of your long running. Project Off Grid. Yep. Which I've been talking about on self-hosted. So, and I'll probably talk a little bit on the Chris Lastcast, you know, Chris Lastcast. It's a big part of your life.

It is. It was a very big expense, too. But holy crap, is it cool, Wes. Like, it's totally off-grid. Even on a bad Pacific Northwest day, like right now, when it's snaining outside, I pull in enough solar to run all of my automation and Raspberry Pis and all of my smart LED lighting systems. Yeah, isn't that amazing? I mean, even in the rainy Pacific Northwest,

solar panels have gotten a lot better. Yeah. So it's all of the always running devices are covered by solar now. How cool is that? So I can't wait to talk more about it on Self Hosted because something I've been wanting to do is build a system that ran on Linux

that could go totally offline so we could go off-grid. I think you might need to record while you're off-grid. Oh, yeah. Test the system. Oh, yeah. Totally do a podcast on Solr. Yeah. Oh, that's got to happen for sure, Wes.

That's totally got to happen. Anyways, that'll be in the future. Check that out, selfhosted.show. And please let us know your thoughts on the burnout topic or anything else we've covered at linuxownplug.com slash contact. Yeah, I'd love to hear some more about how Linux Mint fits in your life. Yeah, it was really helpful. I appreciate people that took the time to help explain it to us.

And a note that that burnout feedback is best over the contact form so we can collate it, because that was the challenge this week because we were pulling from Twitter and Telegram for all this stuff. It was just kind of crazy. So we'll just make that for the official channel. Keep an eye on that. Go get more Wes over at techsnap.systems. He's rocking over there with

Jim Salter. Rocking it. And of course brunch with Brent over at extras.show. I'm at ChrisLAS. He's at Wes Payne. And the whole network's at Jupiter Signal. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next Tuesday! the unplugged program oh thank you everybody jbttitles.com. Let's go vote. Cheese, who's here in the chat room, just not here on air because you can't, asks if they work while going down the road, and they do.

What is so cool about going down the road is not only do the panels still charge the bats, but the alternator, they upgrade it as well. So I'm going down the road, and I'm putting like 300 to 400 amp hours back into my battery bank as I'm driving. That's so cool. So a few hours of driving, and I'll recharge the entire bank. It's pretty great. It's pretty, pretty great.

I've really been just like, I've been really kind of adapting to how nuts it is to have all this all of a sudden after so many years of having this RV and not having that. Byte was asking about the efficiency of the panels. They are 170-watt panels. They're tested at 184 watts with a plus-minus 3% variance. So they just put them at 170 watts. And they're beautiful they are legitimately gorgeous like when i saw them they look like jewelry and they're made in bend organ oh neat

locally made by zamp solar you are so much better prepared for like when the we have like the big earthquake this region's overdue for or the the flooding that's happening in Mount Vernon right now. Holy crap. I've pretty much got all of that packed into my four-wheel drive and can go off-grid for about two weeks. Wow. Oh, yeah, man. That is super, super sweet.

The rides will probably run in the whole thing, and the kids can pick up streaming movies from MB. And we've got a wide connection with an LTE antenna. Back to my house. Dude, we should talk. You and an LTE antenna. Back to my house. Dude, we should talk. You and I need to talk. Oh, my God. We need to, like, seriously, you need to Chris Lastcast it up with me

because we need to talk about this. This is too cool. I could talk for a while about it. Oh, my God. This is totally up my alley. And I am such an idiot that not only would I like to have a huge RSRV, but I'd also love to have, like, an off- an off-road like mobile camper too. So I'd love to have two different RVs, a tiny one and a big one. How the hell would you afford all this?

You don't, that's why I don't do it. I'm perpetually broke. Yeah. I spend way too much money on vehicles. It's, I have a hard time saying no to Lady Joops because it's my home. It's my family memory machine machine it's where i work out of like it's it's kind of your whole life i don't know why you even have a house i don't i own i own a house but i don't actually live in it i rent it out to the production i don't actually stay in the studio that does not surprise me even a little bit yeah i know that's why I have a tent with a small solar panel of 12 volts and a brick-sized 12-volt battery with a solar charger in between. So when I step out of my tent, I put the solar panel on my tent, walk out, do my thing, come back in the evening, put my solar panel back in, and I can charge my phone and stuff. back in and I can charge my phone and stuff. I used to have something very similar when I lived in Mississippi because there was this, you know, fear of hurricanes and then Hurricane

Katrina did happen reinforcing said fear. And so we had, you know, a number of things for supporting, well, the grid's gone. What do we do? When I moved to Connecticut, I didn't bring most of that with me, but you're just kind of making me remind myself of all the things that I should probably have, but don't right now. Yeah. I, I don't know. I am not really doing it in case, you know, a Zombo POC or something like that, but it is nice to have that, um, you know, that kind of insurance. Like if we have a major disaster or if I have to leave the junkyard for some reason, immediately, I'm not totally SOL. I still have three backup cellular mobile data connections that have legacy accounts that can actually take lots more data. So I have a Verizon hotspot. I have two extra T-Mobile lines that have legacy accounts that give me way more data.

way more data and uh in a pinch i can actually probably operate without you know wireline infrastructure at all for including power for about a week because i also have a back i have a ups that's got a humongous battery and if i unplug the computer and plug everything else in it'll last jb titles it's gonna be a real apocalypse to knock you off there neil so it's not only that in aust apocalypse to knock you off there, Neil. In Australia, if you want to go anywhere, you're six hours from anything. You need a little bit of self-sufficiency. There's no fuel. There's no phone connection. There's nothing. So you've got to keep all this stuff running.

That, I love that you have it in a nice mobile rig. That's so great. Spice it with mint. We did minty fresh for the last one. Right. So we got a... The mint mindset. Look at you busting that out. That's not bad.

That is not bad. I like that for some reason. Why do I like that so much? I don't know. I actually did it before we started the show, too. If I remembered what the name of those Girl Scout cookies that are with mints in them, I would suggest that. But I can't remember what they're called. They're Thin Mints?

Yes. Thin Mints, yeah. Although I don't know if I would attribute thin with mint necessarily. Not so thin mints. Yeah, yeah. You see, Thin Mint, that's the perfect variant for a thin client.

It's true. It's true. I wonder how that mint box is doing. I saw a recent picture of it. It looks like a nice little machine. It does. It's unfortunately grotes wonder how that Mintbox is doing. I saw a recent picture of it. It looks like a nice little machine. It does. It's unfortunately grotesquely underpowered, but it is a nice-looking machine. Yeah, dang.

What is this, Apple? Right? It's horrible. All right, well, I kind of want to go with Wes's. Let's see how they... Because we can't do Minty Fresh. We've done that before. Everybody loves Minty Fresh. It's good.

It's the pun to end puns. It is. I'm sure that they get that all. Can you imagine how often the team must... Clem gets so tired when somebody brings it up. I bet this release is the Mintiest Freshest yet. I mean, that must be such... Oh my gosh.

Cliches are the worst. All right. Let's go with Ubuntu 2004 review. Perfect. Yes. Yes.