Linux Mint 20.2

Jonni Bidwell is running low on mint metaphors and time, but the promise of some budget mojito mix expedited this review.

- Jonni Bidwell

IN BRIEF

A long-standing, well regarded, Ubuntu-derived distribution that puts the needs of its users first. Mint is aimed at both home and professional users with wide business use.

SPECS

RAM: 2GB

Disk: 20GB

OTHER EDITIONS

The main text covers the Cinnamon edition, but the other two flavours (MATE and Xfce) are well worth your attention. Both of these desktops are a little lighter than Cinnamon, but we still wouldn’t recommend using them with less than a gigabyte of RAM. In our testing the Xfce edition had the smallest memory footprint, but only by a whisker. For reference, Cinnamon used around 750MB, MATE weighed in at 600MB, and Xfce scored a slimline 550MB. Don’t read too much into those numbers though; fire up a web browser on any of them and open couple of popular websites, and you’ll soon see your memory usage skyrocket into the gigabytes.

the newest MATE 1.26 isn’t included in this Mint. That’s a shame, but something to look forward to in Mint 20.3. Mint Xfce includes the latest 4.16 edition of the desktop, released back in December. Xfce 4.18 is probably a long way off, but we’re still looking forward to it.