IS LINUX MINT 20.3 still the BEST LINUX DISTRO for BEGINNERS?
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00:00 Intro
00:27 Sponsor: Extend the life of your CentOS 8 servers
01:27 Mint makeover: the new theme
03:47 Cinnamon updates
05:31 Application updates
06:58 Is Mint still the best for beginners?
10:31 Get a new Linux device
11:02 Support the channel
First, there is a new default theme. It's not a huge departure from the previous one, but it makes a few interesting choices.
The titlebars now have rounded corners. The titlebar buttons are a bit bigger now, and their hover zone has been expanded, so they're easier to click. These buttons have also taken on a more Windows-like appearance. The toolbar buttons don't use green anymore, nor do the menu items in the still pervasive menubars, the file manager's sidebar also doesn't use a black background anymore, and generally, the default grey has been made lighter compared to the previous one.
The older theme is still available in the repos, under the mint-themes-legacy package, and you can still change colors in the appearance settings.
Speaking of dark mode, Mint now supports it properly, and has made some of their default apps dark by default, mostly the one that display media
This can be configured per app, in their respective preferences.
Also to be noted, the titlebars will now automaticallyt adapt to the dark theme you picked.
Mint 20.3 also improves on the Cinnamon desktop.
First is the calendar integration. In the calendar applet, you can now see events from multiple calendars, using their attributed color, so you can get a quick heads-up of what your day's going to look like
Nemo, the file manager now correctly handles moving or copy pasting files with the same name.
Window animations have been simplified and tuned. Cinnamon also improved support for right to left languages, and it has better integration with nvidia optimus, for supporting apps that don't want to use the default GPU, among a lot of other smaller fixes.
The default apps also have received a lot of updates.
First, there is a new application, called "Thingy". It serves as a document manager, which means it will list all your recent and favorite documents, like PDFs, but also LibreOffice documents.
Hypnotix, the IPTV player now has search to find channels, but also specific movies and series.
The sticky notes app now lets you search through your notes, the title of each note is now embedded into its body, which looks much better, and you can change the text size from the notes toolbar.
XReader, the PDF and document viewer can now read manga properly using right to left mode, and using the arrow keys moves the pages in the right direction: going left moves the document forward.
Is Linux Mint still THE distro to recommend to beginners? Does it still hold up compared to other options that have moved more aggressively, like Fedora, or Zorin OS ?
Mint still offers one of the most complete experiences for newcomers. It comes with a backup tool, a driver manager, power statistics, preferences for virtually anything you might want to change. In that, it still retains an edge over GNOME based distributions, for beginners, especially coming from Windows.
Where Mint falls behind, in my opinion, is in the software manager. Mint bases itself on Ubuntu 20.04, which means that the apps in its repos are outdated. Really outdated.
Apart from that, I don't really see anything that can compete with Mint for beginners, still.
So yeah, for now, MINT keeps the crown, in my opinion. If you want a complete graphical experience, you go to MINT, if you want better looks out of the box, you go to Zorin.