Hi all, this is the second and final part of a multi-part post about Linux Mint 18. In these posts I’ll talk about my experience with upgrading and using the new Mint. This part is about my immediate experience with using it, and why it’s so great XD. By the way, I’m using the Cinnamon version of Mint.

Initial Impressions of Mint 18

Probably the first thing I noticed about Mint 18 was the menu effects: they now slide into view, which I really like (see below).

http://hamishmb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/menus.webm

You can turn this off if you want to, which leads me on to something else: the indicator support was turned off when I upgraded! This is a bit annoying, but really all it means is normal indicators aren’t displayed with Cinnamon’s theme (see video below).

http://hamishmb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/indicators.webm

Yes, that is Wine Autostart… It feels a bit cheap plugging my own program, in my own blog. It’s the most complicated indicator I had at the time, so I have an excuse 🙂

I liked the improvements they made to the update manager, particularly the update policy one. Personally, I think this is really important, because I felt the old way of configuring dissuaded users from installing all the updates, which was a security problem. Of course, I ignored the warnings and installed the updates anyway (no problems by the way!), but less experienced users may have been worried about breaking their system by doing that, even though that doesn’t happen often.

The new theme and the X-Apps

One of the next things I did was try the new theme, which is quite nice, but not quite my style. Given the X-Apps are installed during the upgrade, I thought it weird that Mint-Y needed to be installed manually. If you want to install it after upgrading, you can run:

“sudo apt-get install mint-y-theme mint-y-icons”

In a terminal, or search for those package names in the Synaptic Package Manager. I think they did a really good job with it though. Here is a screenshot of how it looks on Cinnamon:

I like it, but normally what I use is a mixture of 4 different themes. Sounds terrible, but it works out okay, it’s what I’ve used in my little screen captures. It’s KDE’s Oxygen icon theme, paired with Mint-X controls, the OS X Snow Leopard Cinnamon theme, and the Zukimac window borders XD. It actually turns out surprisingly well, and it gels together much better than you’d think 🙂

Lastly, the X-Apps. I’m used to using the GNOME apps, mostly being Gedit for programming, and before that, Pluma from MATE. As far as I can tell, they are almost exactly the same! I think they’re based on QT rather than GTK (correct me if I’m wrong!), but they still seem to look exactly the same. All of that is quite impressive given they probably had to rewrite all of these programs, but they seem great to me, no complaints at all 🙂

Summary

To summarise, I’ve enjoyed using Mint 18 a lot since upgrading. I was immediately impressed with it. This is my last post on Mint 18, so now I leave it in your hands: will you upgrade?