Linux Mint 20.1 has now been officially released, and this is an LTS version which means it will be supported for quite some time until 2025. Plenty of time to get comfy with Linux.
Coming in three official flavours you can pick between the Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments all supported by the Mint team directly. Cinnamon being Mint's own flagship desktop environment, which saw lots of attention this release including some big performance improvements and less resource use with 4K.
Pictured - Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon edition.
As of this release you will also see their brand new Hypnotix IPTV player, which comes with the Free-IPTV provider by default. There's also their very useful looking Web Apps manager, allowing you to turn any website into what almost looks like an actual dedicated desktop application with its own window and icon. Not just new applications though, lots of other improvements to be found throughout the entire release. Here's some of the highlights:
- Better Flatpak support
- Percentage in the sound volume OSD
- The option to always show the panel when the menu is open
- Scrolling in the window-quick-list applet
- Configurable scrolling direction in the workspace-switcher-applet
- The ability to assign a keybinding to mute the microphone
- Zstd support in nemo-fileroller
- Tiff support and PDF page numbers in nemo-media-columns
- Thumbnails for files up to 64GB in nemo
Linux Mint also continues to block the Snap store by default, due to issues the Mint leadership have with how the Snap system is being handled. Since on Ubuntu the Chromium browser is a forced Snap package, the Mint team are now also packaging Chromium for Mint themselves.
See more on the Linux Mint website. Here's quick links for the release notes:
Is Linux Mint a good choice for Linux gaming? Well, we know plenty of people using it who are very happy with it. Accessible for beginners due to the traditional interface and setup, with plenty of room for power users to do whatever they want. Based upon Ubuntu too, it makes things easy when you need to get a little help.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
That said, my main desktop/workstation has been Linux for a very long time; and I do do _some_ gaming on it, mostly keyboard+mouse stuff like RTS, point-and-click adventures, and generally light-duty single player stuff (after all, my gaming hardware isn't in this PC, so it's an older GTX for instance). For those games, it runs them great without any issues at all; this includes setup of course. Steam runs great, Proton does a great job, Minigalaxy is great, some Humblebundle linux games, some AGS games I set up myself, stuff like that. Lutris is good but I find I have to tweak too much to get games working, it's good, but the weird combination of a simple-interface-but-also-kind-of-a-pain-tweaking isn't for me.
So I guess yeah, being Ubuntu based, it's a good choice. Drivers are very easy to set up as well, Steam/the-others are easy to get going, etc. Mint also has sane default packaging that makes it even more ready to use then Ubuntu in my personal opinion. That said, I also don't really play big multiplayer/competitive games whatsoever -- they're just not my jam -- so I can pretty much guarantee that a "good experience" depends on what you want to play. I'm quite sure Anti-cheat stuff is still a problem for linux in general, it just doesn't apply to me since I don't really play those games.
Schattenspiegel Jan 8, 2021
Happily savouring gaming though Linux Mint since 2015 sometimes with a bottle of wine sometimes pure as it comes. Never got tired of the taste.
Last edited by Schattenspiegel on 8 January 2021 at 6:52 pm UTC
[Linux] tayshady Jan 8, 2021
Nevertheless Jan 9, 2021
It just works.
furaxhornyx Jan 9, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsI miss Cinnamon
What prevents you from using it ? There a Community edition of Manjaro Cinnamon, I've been using it since Windows 7 end-of-support.
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