Korora 23 - is it an alternative to Linux Mint?

Cinnamon is a desktop environment that is widely promoted by the Linux Mint team. Linux Mint Cinnamon is their flagship distribution. In its turn, Linux Mint is a leader in the world of Linux distributions, especially for the newbie-oriented part of it. Unfortunately, the recent release of Linux Mint 18 made things worse, and many Linux bloggers wrote about this.

There was a comment on my recent post about Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon that asked me to look into the Korora distribution.

Korora is a distribution that is based on Fedora, similar to the way Mint bases on Ubuntu. Korora's task is to make things "just work". Let's see if this is true.

You can download Korora from one of their many mirrors when you use a special tool on their web site. Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, GNOME and Xfce flavours of Korora are available.

The ISO image of Korora 23 Cinnamon 64-bit is 2.1 Gb in size. I downloaded it and "burnt" onto a USB stick using the dd command.

The stick is in the port of my Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

How to configure keyboard layouts in Cinnamon 2 and higher

Desktop Environments are not something set in stone. They develop and change their design.

Linux notes from DarkDuck published an article some time ago where you could learn how to configure keyboard layouts in Cinnamon Desktop Environment. That article was written in 2013 when Cinnamon 1 was available. That How-to is relevant to that release and its sub-releases only.

Cinnamon 2&3 were released since then. Cinnamon 2 is a part of Linux Mint 16 and, more importantly, Long-Term Support version Linux Mint 17. Cinnamon 3 became a part of recently published Linux Mint 18. These version of DEs have a different approach to keyboard layout settings. Let me show you how to set up different keyboard layouts in Cinnamon 3 in Linux Mint 18 and later, and in other operating systems that use Cinnamon Desktop Environment of version 3 and higher. Cinnamon 2 has a very similar approach with slightly different look of the windows.

Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon: pity, pity, pity

Linux Mint is a long-established leader of the Distrowatch rating. As I am writing this article, the gap between Linux Mint and the runner-up Debian is about 30%. That is why each new release of Linux Mint is an event in the Linux world.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, another great distribution. Of course, there is also a Linux Mint Debian Edition version, but that is a different beast that deserves a separate discussion. Up until recently, each new release of Linux Mint followed the Ubuntu release cycle, be it "regular" or "LTS" version. But since Linux Mint 17, only Ubuntu LTS is considered to be a proper Linux Mint base.

Linux Mint 18 is the first release of Linux Mint on consecutive LTS versions of its base. Did it make any impact on this distribution? Let's check ourselves.

I have already published a quick screenshot tour through the main Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon features. Let's now have a more in-depth look into the Live version of Mint 18.

The ISO image of Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon 64-bit is about 1.7 Gb in size. You can download it either directly from one of many mirrors all around the world, or using torrent. I used the dd command to "burn" that image onto a USB stick.

The USB stick is in the port of my Toshiba Satellite L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon: Quick Screenshot Tour

The release of Linux Mint 18 was very interesting from many aspects. The most interesting for me was the fact that it is the 1st release of Mint based on LTS version of Ubuntu after skipping several non-LTS versions. If you remember, up to Linux Mint 16, each new version was based on consecutive version of Ubuntu, being it LTS or non-LTS version. But since version 17 only Ubuntu LTS editions are used by the Mint team to build their own operating system. Mint 17 was based on Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint 18 is based on Ubuntu 16.04.

The full-blown review is also available. If you prefer a shorter version, let's do a quick whistle-blow tour through the Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon system with some applications you can find out of the box.