News

Donations

Hello everyone! Before I start with the news, I’d like to share a few words about the donations we received in December. You sent us an unprecedented number of donations for an all-time high total of $16,736! We had to check the stats twice to make sure this wasn’t a mistake. This follows the release of Linux Mint 17.3, so not only does it help our funding, it’s also extremely gratifying and motivating for us. Many many thanks to the 714 people who supported us, and to our partners and sponsors for being here for us.

Look and feel

In the comments section of last month’s news I mentioned a “new look and feel” and I noticed this scared some of you a little bit. Let me clarify this. We know who we are, we know what you like and we can tell from your feedback what you expect and whether or not you enjoy something after we release it or how likely you’ll be to enjoy it before we do. We’re also very conservative and very demanding in the way we do things. We know what we want from the OS and if something doesn’t fit we adapt it, replace it or rewrite it. Our vision doesn’t change easily, it remains more or less the same, we’re just constantly refining it. I’ve been at the heart of the MATE project since its beginning and we’ve invested a huge amount of efforts in the Cinnamon project. That was a commitment not to change the desktop paradigms, when GNOME 2 wasn’t available to us any longer we worked around it so that Linux Mint could go on being Linux Mint. We also embraced an LTS strategy and that’s a sign that we’re focused on the long term, we’re not “experimenting”.

We’ve all witnessed the rise of the iPad and the iPhone. This was attributed to iOS somehow and it started a new trend with various projects trying to replicate Apple’s success, inventing new formulas and radically changing their own goals, focus or identity in the process. We’ve seen a new artistic trend called “flat”, with bright colors, no gradients and minimalistic widgets, taking these projects by storm. You don’t see us at the forefront of all that. We do keep a close eye on it, without any intention to jump into it, but rather to learn from it and to see if it can help us improve what we’re already doing.

People who enjoyed Linux Mint years ago still enjoy it nowadays. If you enjoy it now, chances are you’ll enjoy it still for a long time. You’re here because you enjoy it right now, we know that, we enjoy it too, and we’ve no intention of being anything else. So, in the context of that “new look and feel”, we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves. We’re talking about icons and GTK themes here. We’re also committed to supporting Mint-X, so with a click of a mouse you’ll be able to make Mint 18 look just like the way Mint 17 did. Regarding the new themes, we’re working on something that looks more modern without looking minimalistic, professional and with subtle hints of colors without looking flashy. It’s a bit hard to describe, but ideally we want something that conveys the same feeling Mint-X did when it was introduced (years ago), while looking different (because we will ship both themes) and modern.

X-Apps

Work started on Linux Mint 18. One important aspect is GNOME 3.18 (the project and all its components, not just the desktop environment), which includes GTK and many applications used primarily by Cinnamon, but also Xfce and to a lesser extent MATE. A lot has changed between version 3.10 (used in Linux Mint 17) and version 3.18. GTK itself and many of the GNOME applications now integrate better with GNOME Shell and look more native in that environment. The bad news, is that they now look completely out of place everywhere else. To make matters worse, Unity, the flagship product of Ubuntu, relies heavily on GTK, GNOME applications and the GNOME environment itself, so we’re not dealing with the upstream version of 3.18 here, but with a collection of patches which bring their own issues (one example is that Ubuntu reintroduces menubars and titlebars in applications but without rewriting their headerbar.. so you sometimes see all three of them).

In the past, this issue was present but it wasn’t as important. We solved it by downgrading apps (Linux Mint 17 uses gedit 2.30 for instance), patching GNOME (GTK and various GNOME apps) and using alternatives (mostly in MATE and Xfce). This worked well in the short term.

From a long term point of view, we knew this would become more and more of an issue but it was decided early that Cinnamon would not get its own applications, because it represented too much work and there were too few differences in application needs between Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. It just made no sense to invest time in making “Cinnamon applications”. For similar reasons we invested very little time in developing MATE applications.

The idea of working on apps which would be generic, perfectly suited to run in both Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce (and possibly other desktop environments) made more sense. It’s an idea we’ve had for a while and with the start of a new Mint 18.x series the timing was right to get this project started.

X-Apps will be a collection of generic GTK3 applications using traditional interfaces which can be used as default desktop components in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. In Mint 18, the “X apps” will allow us to maintain a native look and a good level of integration because they will be used in replacement of GNOME applications which now look foreign (using headerbars and a distinctive layout). Long-term, the X-App project will allow us to innovate and to develop new features and improvements in the applications themselves (this is something we couldn’t do via patches, temporary forks or DE-specific forks like the MATE apps because it was too costly).

Here’s an example of an X-App. This is, xedit, the text editor:

And here’s how xedit helps us:

It’s based on Pluma, so if you’ve been using pluma (or gedit 2.30) you’ll feel right at home. It looks the same and it works the same way.

It uses GTK3 so it supports HiDPI.

It’s a generic application called “Text Editor” so it looks native in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce (this was already the case for GNOME and MATE applications within Linux Mint thanks to adjustments, here it’s part of the application’s purpose to be generic).

Underneath the hood, it doesn’t depend on GNOME/MATE or tie in with their preferences or lockdown systems like gedit/pluma do.

We no longer need to freeze gedit, so GNOME users can install gedit 3.18 from the repositories.

It’s an application we can develop not only for us but for other distributions and not only for one desktop but for many, therefore working on it improves many of our editions and the Linux landscape around us. We expect the same level of help and interest we have with Cinnamon. We also have ideas on how to improve these apps (anyone familiar with sublime-text’s search/replace bar?) and thanks to these advantages we can invest resources into implementing them.

Airtop

After the success of the MintBox Mini, our long time partner CompuLab recently unveiled a new computer called the “Airtop“.

The new design is extremely impressive. This is a top-range unit which takes advantage of CompuLab’s expertise with passively cooled mini-computers and delivers very high performance and specifications. As usual, this is unique and surprising and we’re very excited about it 🙂

Phoronix thinks it’s “one of the coolest Linux-friendly PCs ever”: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CompuLab-Airtop-Announced

Side by side, the MintBox Mini, the MintBox 2 and the Airtop-G respectively score 605, 1228 and 9155 with GL-Mark2.

Congratulations to our friends at CompuLab 😉

For more info on the Airtop visit http://airtop-pc.com.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by: