Linux Mint 19.3 | Overview
Linux Mint is a popular desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and used by millions of people.
What’s Linux Mint?
The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.
Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions and used by millions of people.
Install 🗜️
Mint 19.3 with Cinnamon was released on December 18th 2019.
For the install, Mint defaults to a live session instead of having a dedicated installer.
Based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it uses the same Ubiquity installer that Ubuntu uses.
Mint uses a pretty straight forward partition setup consisting of a single partition for the root & home partitions and an ESP partition.
Post-Install 💻
After the install & initial login, we’re greeted with a welcome screen that covers pretty much everything important to a new user.
The welcome app recommends the user perform system snapshots, install drivers & updates, as well as options to change the desktop layout.
Looking at the post-install pre-update disk usage, since Mint setup a single partition to house everything, we can see that a fresh Mint install with Cinnamon is just about 7.8Gb. Not bad.
Linux Mint used just under 650mb of ram at idle and most of the CPU activity was coming from htop, which is the tool I used to gather the CPU and Memory numbers.
The flavor of Mint I used for this review is the “flagship” flavor of Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop version 4.4.5.
Cinnamon, being a fully-fledged desktop environment in its own right, comes with its own apps but includes some apps from other projects such as Gnome Archive Manager and Libre Office.
As with any good Linux desktop distro, there’s an app for everything you’d use day-to-day.
Mint’s .profile and .bashrc files contain lots of helpful stuff to make life in the terminal easier. However, most of it is inherited from Debian & Ubuntu.
Updates & Drivers 🛠️
The way Mint handles updates is a bit unintuitive. Mint has its own Software manager for installing & uninstalling apps, but the updates are actually handled in a separate app called Update Manager.
Update Manager has a bunch of really helpful tools such as a PPA manager, mirror changer, and more.
Hardware drivers & firmware are handled in another dedicated app. It’s a carryover from Ubuntu and you can configure a PPA to install the very latest drivers if needed.
The startup time after updates & installing drivers is just over 20 seconds from the bootloader.
neofetch provides a bunch of additional information about Linux Mint in a cool format.
Codecs & Application Management 📻
All of the following audio formats played fine but most of them played via the video player rather than the media player:
- ac3
- flac
- m4a
- mp3
- ogg
- wma
The only video codec that had issues was the ffv1 mkv file which was super choppy. The others played back just fine:
- h265 mp4
- vp9 webm
The two AppImages I tested took a few seconds to startup but the launched without any issues besides the startup time.
Flatpaks work out of the box and Flathub is enabled in the Software Manager without any extra configuration. They took forever to install during the review for some reason though.
Snaps are not supported but you can install snapd from the default repos.
Volumes & Network Sharing 🖧
Samba is not installed or configured by default but it’s easy enough to do with the built-in tools which again may come from Ubuntu rather than Mint itself.
However even after Samba was installed, neither my Linux workstation nor my Windows laptop was automatically discovered on the network.
Despite the lack of network discovery, I was able to access my Windows laptop directly via Samba with the IP address just fine.
I was also able to access my Linux workstation via ssh and the IP address without any issues.
And finally, my printer was detected and installed automatically.
Gaming Support 🎮
I use a PS4 controller to test Bluetooth support, which Mint seemed to struggle a bit with.
First, the controller said it connected but the Bluetooth manager said it didn’t. Then, it was the other way around.
After some fiddling, I was able to connect it and use the little mouse pad thing on the controller.
Dirt — Native Linux via Steam
Unfortunately, Steam did not want to recognize the controller no matter what I did. This caused major issues in driving games like Dirt here, where the controls were a mess.
The graphics defaulted to the lowest possible which is made everything look bad and washed out.
I was able to turn the graphics to medium and still have it be playable (to me) between 15 to 25 fps.
Overwatch — Windows via Wine + DXVK
I played a full round of Overwatch using the default settings it chose, which was low-medium at 1080p.
I averaged probably 30 to 35 with some very brief stuttering here and there. Definitely playable with these settings.
Obviously Overwatch isn’t a Linux game and I was running this with Lutris via Wine 4.20 with the amazing DXVK translation layer.
Sauerbraten — Native Linux via default repos
I also like to try out native Linux games from the default repositories.
This weird game called Saurbraten is one of the first Linux-native First Person Shooters I played way back when I first started using Linux.
Sauerbraten hasn’t aged well but the performance was great. And it has a ton of content for being a mostly forgotten Free & Open Source game.
Benchmarks 🏁
Since this is the first distro in the series, we’re going to compare it to Ubuntu 18.04 from last season.
Despite using the same kernel version, Linux Mint beat Ubuntu 18.04 in every single test listed, doing the best in the multi-core performance section.
The Ubuntu benchmark was run on September 13th of 2019 so perhaps there have been performance-enhancing updates but I can’t confirm that.
You can view the full comparison on the Geekbench website here.
Summary 🕵️
I usually write a segment some parting thoughts about the distro here but I didn’t write any into the original script.
Instead, I’ll just say:
I think Linux Mint is a pretty standard desktop-oriented Linux distro.
It doesn’t do anything bad or have any major faults, but it’s also not terribly exciting, either.
For a regular desktop user searching for a good, reliable Linux desktop distribution, Linux Mint is a very safe bet. ✌️
