December 2017: PLUG Meeting Notes

[Jason]

I presented on new features of Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon tonight. Great turnout tonight where we also shared pizza, chips, cookies, eggnog and pop. Thanks to Bob and Rachelle for arranging a large part of the food including the pizza and to those others that brought snacks.

The new features I presented tonight came directly come from this page on the Linux Mint website. If it interests you enough to upgrade from 18.2 there is an upgrade article in the Linux Mint blog. Of course, it's a good idea to also check the release notes to make know about any known issues with particular hardware.

Note that some of these features are new features to Linux Mint and will also apply to the MATE, Xfce, and KDE versions. You should check the new features page for the other desktop versions to be sure. Note that at present it's just the beta versions of Xfce and KDE that are out right now although the final versions should be out within a month or so.

And for those that are new to Linux or LM entirely, refer to the attached slideshow from the September 2017 meeting.

Updated: Attached slideshow and explanatory text.

[fox]

Great presentation, Jason. I learned a lot about the new features of Mint 18.3, even though I had already installed it. I really like Timeshift, and I'm going to start using it once I decide where to keep its backups.

The more I learn about Mint, the more I appreciate some of its outstanding features that distinguish it from Ubuntu. While I don't plan to replace Ubuntu on my home computer or my Dell laptop, I really enjoy using it on my office computer and I don't think I would replace it with Ubuntu there even if the next version fixes some of the sound and video problems I've had with Linux on that computer.

[Jason]

Actually, I think I jumped the gun about only keeping backups from Timeshift on an external drive. It can still be useful to backup locally if you're just looking to fix something that an update broke or an accidentally deleted system file, as long as you can still log in and run it. And as long as the drive is accessible, you could get the files off of it, do a LM reinstall and then use Timeshift to restore.

But if the partition or drive is so borked that you can't even access those files, then obviously an external drive would be better. Remember that Linux installs themselves aren't that huge, you can buy 32/64 GB USB drives quite cheaply now.

As always, if your data doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist at all (i.e. you should have more than a single backup always).