If you’ve ever looked into the Linux operating system, chances are pretty good that you’ve run across a mention of Linux Mint. And if you’ve done any digging, then you’ve probably read accounts of user after user, pundit after pundit proclaiming that Linux Mint is the most user-friendly distribution on the market.

I’m here to back that claim up.

Yes, Linux Mint is one of (if not the) best Linux distributions for new users.

But what is it about Linux Mint that makes it so good for those who’ve never touched Linux?

Let me explain exactly why this claim has been true for some time and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

What Is Linux Mint?

First off, Linux Mint is an open source operating system that is based on Ubuntu. It uses the same package manager (APT), the same access control system (AppArmor) and strives to be as simple as possible.

One of the first things users notice about Linux Mint is the desktop environment, which is called Cinnamon. The Cinnamon desktop offers an immediate familiarity because it resembles Windows. That’s right, if you’ve ever used Windows, you’ll feel right at home with Linux Mint and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon offers all the usual features: a panel, start menu, system tray and clickable icons. If you’ve used any iteration of Microsoft’s OS since Windows 95, you’ll feel right at home on Cinnamon.

Click the Start button, and you’ll see a desktop menu that gives you quick access to all of the installed applications. You’ll also notice that there are plenty of preinstalled apps, such as Firefox, LibreOffice, a backup tool, multimedia players, a fingerprint configuration tool and so much more. Out of the box, you’ll find Mint has everything you need to get started with creative and productive projects — or just to keep you entertained.

Of course, the user-friendliness goes well beyond the desktop and preinstalled applications. In fact, there are tons of small tweaks found with Linux Mint that come together to make this such a fantastic option for those new to Linux.

Let’s take a look.

It’s the Little Things

System Reports

When you first start using Linux Mint, you’ll eventually see a small shield icon pop up in the system tray. Click on that icon to open the System Reports app, where you can view system reports, system information and crash reports.

The best thing about the System Reports app is that it gives you a helping hand to make Linux Mint even more user-friendly.

For example, you might be prompted to install the necessary codecs for multimedia. On some distributions, you have to do a bit of research on how to install those codecs, and this process can vary from distribution to distribution.

On Linux Mint, you’ll be prompted to click a button to install those codecs (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Installing multimedia codecs is as simple as a mouse click on Linux Mint.

You might also be informed that you can set up the system restore utility (which I highly recommend you do). Again, this is a quick click away from within the System Reports tool.

Updates

Updates are also taken care of very easily with Linux Mint. You’ll be alerted to any updates from the system tray. Click the icon to open the Update Manager, where you can click Install Updates to take care of the task.

Desklets

Desklets are like widgets you might find on macOS, Android or iOS. These tiny applications extend the feature set of your Linux Mint desktop.

To add a desklet to Cinnamon, right-click on any open spot on the desktop and click Desklets. From the resulting window (Figure 2), you can select a desklet and then click + to add it to your desktop.

Figure 2: Adding desklets to Cinnamon is very easy.

Out of the box, you’ll find three available: Clock, Digital photo frame and Launcher. You can click the Download tab, where you’ll find plenty of other available desklets, from to-do lists, clocks, calendars, notes, battery level indicators, host checks, media controls and much more.

The Menu

The Cinnamon Menu (Figure 3) offers 4 components:

• Favorites: Upper portion of the sidebar, where you can pin apps for quick access.
• Power: Lower portion of the sidebar, where you can lock the screen, power off or restart your machine.
• Search: Top of the menu, where you can search for installed applications.
• App list: Main section, where you can scroll through a categorized app listing.

Figure 3: The Cinnamon menu is as easy as it gets.

You’ll also find two different categories within the Cinnamon menu: Administration and Preferences. Administration is where you take care of tasks like users and groups, login window, fingerprints, backups, software sources and more. This portion of the menu is all about managing your system.

On the other hand, the Preferences menu is just that: user-level bits such as account details, network configuration, backgrounds, Bluetooth, color, date and time, font selection and more.

Web Apps

Finally, there are web apps. If you don’t know what these are, think of them as a website that is rolled into an easy-to-use desktop application. Essentially, web apps strip away most of the web browser’s components until it’s nothing more than a window housing the website in question.

Some web browsers include a feature that allows you to create web apps from pages, but Linux Mint includes a dedicated app for this purpose. With the Web Apps app (Figure 4), you can turn any website into a web app. The beauty of this is that it declutters your web browser, so you don’t have a bazillion tabs open, thereby making your browser more efficient to use.

Figure 4: The Linux Mint Web Apps tool.

Once you create a web app, you can launch it from the Cinnamon desktop menu.

The thing about Linux Mint is that the developers have gone out of their way to ensure that everything ties together beautifully in such a way that anyone (and I do mean anyone) can use Linux Mint as not just an introduction to Linux, but as a full-time operating system.

If you’re interested in giving Linux Mint a try, download an ISO from the official site, burn it to a USB drive with a tool like UnetBootin, insert the USB drive into a spare machine, boot it up and install it. You won’t regret the five to 10 minutes you’ll spend during the installation.

TRENDING STORIES