Month: January 2019

Enlarge / Say hi to a dramatic angle of a javelin robo-suit. You'll need one of these to zip around Anthem. (credit: EA/Bioware)

On Friday, EA and Bioware gave everyone who pre-ordered the online shooter Anthem access to a "VIP demo," complete with missions and combat-filled zones from the upcoming game. The result may very well be the most cruel definition of "VIP" ever sold by a video game company.

And it comes with a serious case of déjà vú. A longtime game maker known for sprawling, choice-filled adventures has thrown its hat into the "shared online shooter" ring, and the public's first taste is a buggy, uneven mess that lands somewhere shy of a beta. Months after Fallout 76's wonky pre-release demo, here we are again with a disconnect-ridden taste of Anthem.

In this week's case, there's something worse going on than unoptimized netcode. Anthem has arrived with some beautiful imagery, lush worlds, and intriguing, jetpack-fueled blasts into the sky. At its best, Bioware's latest game feels like dreamy action-gaming catnip. But a few immediately apparent problems, including inelegant combat, stilted world-building, and confusing systems, make one thing clear: Destiny 2 already seems like a better game, and that's not a good starting point for a latecomer.

Enlarge / Cinnamon 4.0's new look in Linux Mint 19.1 (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Perhaps that's understandable with IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop. For the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight. Still, the Linux Mint team did churn out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base.

While the new release may not have garnered mass attention, and probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud," Linux Mint nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube, odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop, it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu... and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth. For a distro, that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users.

There's a good reason for that popularity: Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm," or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. The team behind Mint is just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work.