Linux Mint 20 success or issues

[deepakdeshp]

Please post your experience of LM20 here. Whether everything worked or you ran into problems. Whether the upgrade or fresh install was a success or failure and so on.

[Beerislife]

Fresh install on a Thinkpad Edge 0578CTO with Crucial MX500SSD 8Gb RAM. Connected to HDMI Dell 24" IPS monitor.

Transparent Panel extension not compatible (loaded from a previous install of 19.3) Upgrade to extension doesn't help.

On login screen is three quarters black with a quarter visible on the right. Removing HDMI connector and reinserting fixes it.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/TaAZjBGHKHekczeL7

[smurphos]

Transparent Panel extension not compatible (loaded from a previous install of 19.3) Upgrade to extension doesn't help.

It works fine if you over-ride the warning - the applet just needs a update for it's metadata for compatible Cinnamon versions.

[Beerislife]

Yup, found out myself. Transparency is now OK. Need to find time to troubleshoot monitor problem. Have to update the boss's machine first.

[nlsthzn]

Installed LM 20 Beta even before it was officially announced on an Asus TUF FX705DY laptop. Most distro's wish their final release was as polished as the beta. I hope to be able to get my wifi to to connect properly after sleep with a few lines I found on the driver troubleshooting page, after which I can say that I have no issues and LM 20 works great, looks great.

[Dark Owl]

The experience is less good with GeForce GT 710 graphics card - in common with 19.3 (but not 19.2), 20β will not boot from iso without selecting compatibility mode. Installed and with Nvidia driver added it works OK.

Display options are a bit weird with UHD monitor - Hi-DPI requires setting base interface scaling = double and zoom = 200% (together). Login window setting only needs Hi-DPI support enabled (independent of zoom).

[deepakdeshp]

Awaiting for Mint 20 upgrade instructions, which will be in July

[cain2log]

Just did a fresh install of Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon. First bug experienced: the terminal would not open, whether I click on the panel, the quick launcher, the menu launcher, or press CTL+ALT+T. Neither does clicking on "Open in Terminal" in Nemo open the terminal.

Update: Installed Konsole, and it works well (so far), even in Nemo. Should I go ahead and just remove the default Gnome-Terminal?

Update2: Went back to Tricia, and found out that Gnome-Terminal doesn't work there either apparently after I installed the Mint-Y Dark theme. This theme apparently has conflicts with the Gnome-Terminal both in Tricia and Ulyana, but works well with Konsole. Don't have time now to investigate further.

[cain2log]

Two more bugs:

1. Unlike Tricia, Ulyana does not see Wine. It has to be told to get Wine to run .exe files.
2. Unlike in Tricia, in Ulyana TheWord complains that "File [C:\users\user-name\Temp\1893565796\HiSB.otx.exe] is not a known file type or archive." Tricia does not make this complaint at all, and just straightaway installs TheWord modules from the web.

In these cases, including the issue of the Gnome-Terminal reported above, Ulyana seems to have lost the LM power that Tricia has.

[NewDisciple]

A bit of both I'm afraid. I installed 20 and to my dismay, after the fact I discovered that my password manager had been removed from Synaptic. I won't repeat the words I initially used but it boiled down to this. A password manager is a very important item when you have around 50 encrypted passwords and my question is if something that important is removed why was there no advance warning from Synaptic maintainers to Ubuntu to Linux Mint to include other distributions? I was so mad that I even installed several other distributions but realized that they severely limited me so I reinstalled 20. Then I downloaded 19, burned it to a dvd, ran it live, downloaded Revelation and recovered my passwords. So if anyone still on 19 uses Revelation password manager you have been warned, at least on this post. As to 20 it has been great as always aside from my previous words.

[smurphos]

@NewDisciple - it always pays to do your research - either via playing with a live session before install or by a websearch.

Revelation is indeed removed - it was last maintained in 2012 and was dropped by Debian after Stretch so never made it to the Focal repos.

People can check what's available in the Focal repos via searching https://packages.ubuntu.com/

[Portreve]

Ok, so I decided to install the release version of LM 20 today. Clean installation as per usual.

Holy firetrucking stuff, Batman!

When I installed LM 19.3 on my WD Black M.2 drive, I was kind of expecting somewhat better performance. However, it wasn't really any better than on my SSD.

But with 20... good God! Every program I've installed loads near instantaneously. Every. Program. This is the performance I was expecting. So glad to finally see it.

And I'll remind everyone here this near instant business is happening on an 8th gen i5 system, so nothing insanely cutting edge.

[Barbados99]

I'm very pleased with the XFCE release. I did a clean install on two laptops. The first one is an old and under-powered Intel Celeron N3150. I've tried a number of distros on this computer and it's always been a real dog... almost Un-useable and so frustrating to work with. But it really is pretty snappy with this Mint 20 XFCE. It's using 538mb of memory when first powered up, so pretty good. I like how the XFCE is very flexible so it can be customized to just what I want. Very nice. I've been running this since the beta was released and have not had any issues.

I've also loaded it on a more powerful laptop running a Intel Core i7-8850H. I could run the Cinnamon on this one but honestly I like the XFCE once it's configured to what I like. So I'm not having any issues and am quite pleased. I'm really grateful that Mint offers an XFCE desktop option like this. Kudos on this Mint 20 release. Love it.

[Moonstone Man]

Please post your experience of LM20 here. Whether everything worked or you ran into problems. Whether the upgrade or fresh install was a success or failure and so on.

For me it was unmitigated success, but I read the release notes first. If only more people would bother to do that, but I guess many people just don't want to bother reading anything.

On the negative side, I can see why some people have trouble even after reading the release notes. It's implicit, not explicit, that if you have an nVidia or AMD card then the way to install is to boot into compatibility mode, perform the installation then also follow the second part of the incorrectly named ''Solving freezes during the boot sequence" section.

[Dark Owl]

On the negative side, I can see why some people have trouble even after reading the release notes. It's implicit, not explicit, that if you have an nVidia or AMD card then the way to install is to boot into compatibility mode, perform the installation then also follow the second part of the incorrectly named ''Solving freezes during the boot sequence" section.

I agree, the necessary information is two clicks and most of the way down the page. It's like they almost don't want people to know, in case they might be put off - but there's nothing more off-putting than trying out the iso and finding it just doesn't work on default settings. The info needs to be much more up-front, or preferably not necessary.

The last release which works (ie boots to a desktop direct from the iso without intervention) as standard on my rig is 19.2. If 19.2 boots, why can't 19.3 or 20? Something got broken when the kernel was up-issued.

[Moonstone Man]

The last release which worked as standard on my rig is 19.2.

The release notes are important, people don't appreciate that it's next to impossible nowadays to create a bootable ISO that will boot on any equipment. There is just so much technology available and not all of it is implemented properly. That said, half the booting problems are caused by the open source nouveau driver, which I think is a complete rat's nest as far as compatibility goes.

[Dark Owl]

The release notes are important,

Yes, they are - but what I'm saying is they shouldn't be if Mint is promoted as the Windows replacement for the common man. What would have happened to Windows if it didn't boot?

people don't appreciate that it's next to impossible nowadays to create a bootable ISO that will boot on any equipment.

Fair comment, but it was working (for me) up to 19.2 after which something broke. Having now discovered something is broken some effort should go into working out what and planning a way to fix it - but I recognise the effort to do that is not sexy and unrewarding.

[Moonstone Man]

Fair comment, but it was working (for me) up to 19.2 after which something broke. Having now discovered something is broken some effort should go into working out what and planning a way to fix it ...

The problem is the Linux kernel. It's monolithic. It contains all drivers, unlike Windows, so it's always behind the 8 ball in that respect because it doesn't often get drivers until some poor soul offering their free time writes it and submits it, then they have to put up with personal abuse from Torvalds

The other part of the problem is that vendors that do provide drivers for the kernel are very often focussed on their main market, which is Windows, so that gets first and best pick. Maybe someone will one day invent code to do with all drivers what ndiswrapper does on Linux for Windows network drivers.

[Moem]

The release notes are important,

Yes, they are - but what I'm saying is they shouldn't be if Mint is promoted as the Windows replacement for the common man.

I have never ever seen any communication from the Linux Mint team where it was stated that Mint was that. And that's a good thing. As we know, it's not, and people who insist that it is are not speaking on behalf of the team.

[deepakdeshp]

The release notes are important,

Yes, they are - but what I'm saying is they shouldn't be if Mint is promoted as the Windows replacement for the common man. What would have happened to Windows if it didn't boot?

people don't appreciate that it's next to impossible nowadays to create a bootable ISO that will boot on any equipment.

Fair comment, but it was working (for me) up to 19.2 after which something broke. Having now discovered something is broken some effort should go into working out what and planning a way to fix it - but I recognise the effort to do that is not sexy and unrewarding.

Windows booting successfully is another story, Thankfully in Linux 99% of the drivers are included in the kernel , you dont need to install them separately.
Installing Windows drivers one by one separately for each device is a nightmare. I have observed that Winwoes require a driver to be installed even for usb sticks when inserted.