Linux Mint 19 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2023. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.
In Linux Mint 19, the star of the show is Timeshift. Although it was introduced in Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases, it is now at the center of Linux Mint’s update strategy and communication.
Thanks to Timeshift you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it’s as if the problem never happened.
This new release is jampacked with new features and improvements, and I must say this looks mightily intriguing.
Well done, Mint team!
Mint is a damn-solid Ubuntu alternative for the Windows-accustomed masses. In its MATE incarnation it’s also my go-to distro for reinvigorating old hardware that had previously been running Windows XP. The best part is that they really seem to care about making things nice for non-technical desktop users. It’s a mission shared by only a couple of distros, the other major one being Elementary OS, which however offers a decidedly more Mac-like take on things. However Mint remains the most visible such project, and the best for Windows or classic Gnome fans. If nothing else the community will forever be in their debt for creating Cinnamon (classic Gnome DE based on GTK3) and continuing development of Gnome 2.x in the form of MATE.
Hats off, to many more successful years of Mint!
Edited 2018-06-30 09:08 UTC
I used Linux Mint for many many years and regularly contributed to their forums as well as created many themes and graphics still available on Gnome-look. Linux Mint’s strength is in its community of users as well as its focus on creating a distribution that is extremely easy to use while still wielding the full power of Linux. Mint has once again done a spectacular job with its new version 19. The only reason I no longer use Mint is that I am a restless Linux user and I like the cutting edge. Thankfully Manjaro fills that need for me. Another great Linux distribution. Congratulations to the Linux Mint team for another groundbreaking release.
Edited 2018-06-30 12:31 UTC
Yes I agree with the comments above. Mint is great. Personally I prefer Arch with XFCE, but I use a few apps from the Cinnamon project because they integrate better. (E.g., evince –> xreader )
There was an April 1st joke about Mint switching to Arch as upstream. I would love to see that joke become reality 🙂
So this is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which I’ve been using since it came out. My one gripe with it is that it promotes the use of snap packages which are different than the ones from apt. For example, you may get the binary but you’ll be missing the man pages. Another problem is that snap requires snapd which requires systemd which doesn’t work under Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Mint doesn’t use Snap, instead it has integrated Flatpak, which is kind of like Snap but with a focus on decentralized repositories and cross-distro compatibility. Flatpak however is only intended for desktop applications, making it equally useless in the context of WSL, but great for a desktop-focused distro like Mint.
Edited 2018-07-01 10:48 UTC
The simple solution to your problem is to stop running Ubuntu under Windows. If you need Windows, then run it in a virtual machine under Ubuntu.
Or Ubuntu VM under Windows… (that way you get quick access to a major reason why many people stick with Windows, games)