Review Linux Mint 18 Sarah General Information -Part 2

Current release features:Cinnamon 3.0

Window management improvements on tiling, mapping and unmapping windows, compositor’s window groups and tracking of full screen windows

Improved out of the box touchpad support (edge-scrolling and two-finger-scrolling can now be configured independently and are both enabled by default)

New accessibility and sound settings (both rewritten as native cinnamon-settings modules)

Battery powered devices can be renamed

Different favorite applications can now be set for plain-text, documents and source code files

Panel launchers now include application actions

Animation effects are now enabled by default on dialogs and menus

Favorites and system options can now be disabled in the menu applet

The photo-frame desklet now also scans subdirectories

Improved support for GTK 3.20, Spotify 0.27, Viber

Kernel 4.4
Systemd now default
No media codecs (You can install them during the installation process easily, this is a non-issue)
X-apps
New theme
Improved update manager
Improved audio
Libreoffice 5

Mint specific software and tools:

More information on these can be founf at the Linux Mint Wikipedia page.

Software Manager (mintInstall)
Update Manager (mintUpdate)
Main Menu (mintMenu)
Backup tool (mintBackup)
Upload Manager (mintUpload)
Domain Blocker (mintNanny)
Desktop Settings
Welcome screen (mintWelcome)
Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE)

Linux Mint versions available:

Official Mint versions include Cinnamon, Mate (Gnome2), and LMDE which is a rolling release based on Debian Stable instead of Ubuntu.

I am pretty sure they're still developing KDE and XFCE versions at a lower priority, but the Mint site doesn't show any reference to those as far as I can tell at the moment.

New release development cycle:

Mint follows Ubuntu's release cycle. Meaning there's a new release every six month with a Long term support release every two years.

Hardware requirements and recommendations

System requirements:

Again I think this is laughable. Mint and Cinnamon are definitely lighter than a Gnome or KDE environment. But I don't think it would run smooth on even 1Gig of RAM. However, I'll be doing a desktop comparison at some point in the future and minimum specs is something I'll try out.

512MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
9GB of disk space (20GB recommended).
1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen).

My hardware

I run a Dell Inspiron 7737 17 laptop. I bought this beast (not really) specifically because I distro-hop compulsively and I got tired of dealing with hardware issues. And with a rare exception (*coughs* Debian...) everything almost always works out of the box, regardless of distro).