Featured Comments: Week of 2016 July 31

There was one post this past week that got two comments, so I'll repost both of those.

Review: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" MATE

An anonymous reader said, "The scrollbar-jumping decision is a mind-numbinglingy stupid UI decision. I'd love to know why the GTK-3 Firefox people thought it was such a good idea (along with removing the up/down arrows on scrollbars). It smacks of the kind of totalitarian UI thinking that drove GNOME 3. It IS fixable by adding a line or two to .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini (INI??? This isn't windows for god's sake...), but it should never have come to that."

Commenter DarkDuck had a similar review to share: "Yet another "not-so-nice" review of Mint 18. http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2016/07/linux-mint-18-cinnamon-pity-pity-pity.html".

Thanks to both of those people for commenting. Given that I'm essentially posting only once a month now, I don't anticipate having much to post for the rest of this month (unless I happen to think of something). That said, I do intend to have at least one Linux distribution review out by next month. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" MATE

My laptop is getting old, and Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce will only be supported for one more year. Given this, I figured it might be time to seriously start looking into newer distributions for upgrade (even if I don't actually upgrade right away). Linux Mint just released its latest version, giving me all the more reason to review it.

Main Screen + Linux Mint Menu

The biggest change (as far as I can see) is that multimedia plugins and codecs are no longer included by default. From what I understand, this was done not due to any legal issue, but because maintaining separate installable/live bootable ISO images with and without codecs was becoming costly in terms of time and effort. Instead, the distribution provides alternative ways to install those plugins and codecs in the live and installed system. There are of course smaller updates to the distribution, including new applications and a new interface theme. (Also, on a much more minor note, although the codename still ends in an "a"/"ah" sound, this is the first Ubuntu-based release whose codename doesn't actually end in the letter "a".)

I tested this on a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.