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Linux Mint 18 - "Sarah" |
Mint 18 - Forgetting Sarah Linux
One of the chief advantages of Mint over Ubuntu is that it gave its users, newb and pro, all the ingredients for seamless fun. You wanted to watch a movie or listen to some music, no matter how odd or weird or funky your codecs was, you had them all. Now, this supreme distinction has been deleted. No more.
Reviews of Linux Mint 18, Sarah, were mixed, with some in favour and others critical of several specific new problems, considering that overall the release was a significant disimprovement. Multimedia codecs, hitherto included in the standard Mint distribution, were no longer included in Sarah, although, as with all Linux distributions, they could be loaded separately.
After the attack Linux Mint was severely criticized as being a distribution that, unlike many others at the time, "just worked" and became popular with non-technical users, but at the expense of security, with some security updates to the underlying Ubuntu or Debian blacklisted due to compatibility issues.
Now it doesn't "just work" as well as it used to for newbies and security problems are still there.
At the end you mentioned security problems, but the post was mainly about missing codecs for video and music playback. Mint Mate 18.3 is working just fine on my equipment. However, I ran into some glitchiness using Cinnamon on the same laptop.