Linux Mint 18: beyond Cinnamon

A little over a month ago has been released Linux Mint 18, and only a few days ago the the update from Mint 17.x to Mint 18 was released. And in this new version, the most talked feature is the Cinnamon 3.0, 4.4 kernel and “X-Apps” and several other enhancements.

Very good, right? Wrong. I should have followed the recommendation of the Mint staff, that says “only update your system if it’s really necessary, because the Mint 17.3 support will probably will be longer than you in this world”. In my environment, two applets that I use on the Cinnamon stopped working. The first, the processor speed picker only shows the current speed, not allowing more select the processor speed. The solution: use another applet. The second is the “Touchpad indicator classic” that no longer disables the touchpad when a mouse is plugged into my notebook. The solution to this second problem was to use the configuration of the Mint and disable the touchpad forever. I think in both cases I just have to wait while the staff updates applets for the new version of Cinnamon.

The third negative point I noticed, which is more my mistake than the development of the Mint (the truth is that this is not a Linux Mint problem, but is a AMD problem) is related to drivers for ATI/AMD video cards. Why this is my mistake? For buying a notebook with this graphics card. According to the release notes of Mint 18, the latest version of Catalyst driver (fglrx) is not compatible with the XOrg 1.18 (present in Mint 18). Also according to the release notes, AMD has no more interest in keeping this driver for Linux and they recommends the use of open source drivers. In other words, 3D acceleration is OFF. If you do not believe me, see for yourself clicking here .

But what most caught my attention after the operating system upgrade, was to see that the Remmina won a new version. For those who don’t know, Remmina is a client SSH+VNC+RDP+NX+XDMCP+Telepathy (and other plugins that was not created yet). For those who provide remote support, it is very handy utility. I’m reporting this because this utility has at least three versions of Mint (15, 16 and 17) stopped at version 0.9.99, “getting” just minor bug fixes. After seeing that the Remmina was “a little” different, I decided to check your version, which to my surprise is now 1.1.2 together with a link to the Remmina webpage. The project page has been completely redesigned. The latest news on the Remmina blog is the release candidate of version 1.2.0. What I did after see these news? I downloaded the Remmina 1.2rc version. The first visible changes is the GTK3, more easy to use, faster and more stable. Take a look:

Remina 1.2rc
Remina 1.2rc

Ohhh, before someone asks, I removed the applets 🙂

3 thoughts on “Linux Mint 18: beyond Cinnamon

    • Fabio Luis Girardi Post authorReply

      I don’t know, because I’m still using Linux Mint 17.3 and not tested this version/environment.

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