Mint 13 is the Long Term Support release of Mint Linux. This means that people should be able to rely on the features and functionality over a number of years without worrying about change.

While many Linux distributions have multiple "flavors" with different desktops, most choose one specific desktop for their official product. In the case of Mint 13, it appears they treat each of their desktops as equally "official" and therefore all covered by the same long term support.

Specifically, Mint has added two new desktops:

- The MATE desktop. MATE is a fork of the classic Gnome 2 desktop that looks and feels basically the same as Mint 11.
- The Cinnamon desktop. A new desktop built on top of Gnome 3, as seen in Mint 12, without the Gnome 3 desktop.

MATE:

First, a quick look at Mint 13 with "MATE".

Not really much to see here. It looks and works just like Mint 11. This is very good news for those who are familiar with or need the flexibility of the classic Gnome 2 desktop.

It has the same Mint "Start" menu, the same unified control panel, the same panel customizability... and it gets my monitor and time settings right!

One difference from Mint 11 is that normal scroll bars are back.

As always, a few shortcomings with the themes and color schemes. Only certain themes let you select custom colors, and even then it is only for a few elements. For example, if I change all the colors in the default theme to purple, the check boxes are still green. Or if I pick the WinME theme, I can not change the title bar color or any other colors!

In addition to Gnome being renamed to "Mate", The Nautilus file browser has been renamed to "Caja".

Over all this has the same sensible and solid organization and configurability of the standard Gnome 2 desktop. Since this is a long term support release, there is no fear that this desktop is going to go away. I highly recommend Mint 13 with Mate.

Cinnamon:

On to Mint 13 with the "Cinnamon" desktop.

Much of Mint 13 is quite similar to Mint 12.

Unlike Mint 12 there is no extra panel at the top. And the "Unity"-like full screen menu is nowhere to be seen.

The "Start" menu is similar to the one in Mint 12, but with a different color scheme. It still uses a poor choice of icons for Firefox and the file manager.

The control panels have been significantly cleaned up in Mint 13, but I still find myself jumping between control panel applets for related setting that should be combined in one place.

It still has two separate control panels, (as well as a control panel program group) but they at least look visually similar.