“Won’t people think it’s 20 years old?” management asked when they saw our Linux Mint cover. That made us pause. It’s not older than Ubuntu and that’s 15-years old. So we stuck to the facts: Linux Mint 20 is out and it’s about to turn 14-years old on 27 August 2020.
It was Mint 13 that adopted the Cinnamon desktop and helped put Linux Mint on the map. The aim was to create a classic desktop, designed how users wanted a desktop to work - an entirely reasonable request. With Linux Mint 20 there’s been another shift in direction: the distro is distancing itself from Snaps. Again, the reasoning is fair. Snaps are being surreptitiously installed when you apt-get certain packages, and can’t be audited. There’s a vocal group of Mint users who support the shift away from Snaps, and yet the primary users of Snaps outside of Ubuntu… are Mint users. There’s some irony here: people left Ubuntu because it wasn’t offering them what they wanted. Is Mint doing the same thing?