News

We’ll talk a bit about development this month. It’s still too early to talk about some of the big things we’re working on (vertical panels and multiple backgrounds in Cinnamon, new icon and GTK themes) but some cool changes landed already so I’ll try to give you a little overview.

Before we get to that though, I’d like to thank all the people who fund us. We’re able to be where we are and to do what we do thanks to our partners, sponsors and the many people who send us donations. Our user base grew again since the release of Linux Mint 17.3 and we received more donations than usual in February and March, probably as a solidarity response to the attacks led against our project. Despite the important downtime in February and the fact that people couldn’t donate during the attacks, we recorded more than 600 donations and more than $14,000 at the end of the month. That’s really amazing.

Another piece of good news is that we’ll soon announce a new partnership with our friends at Sucuri, who are about to become our third biggest sponsor.

Improvements in the Update Manager

As many other tools in Linux Mint 18, the Update Manager was given HiDPI support and ported to more recent toolkits and libraries. It is now coded in Python 3 and it nows uses GTK3 and GSettings.

The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations. And the user interface was slightly improved to better work with alternative themes (toolbar icons are now compatible with dark themes, application and status icons are now themeable and dimmed text is now rendered with dynamic colors).

Two new settings were added to let you see and select kernel updates. Even though these aren’t really updates, but the availability of packages for newer kernels, the manager is now able to detect them and to present them for installation to you as a traditional update. These are level 5 updates but the new settings let you configure them independently.

A lot of work was done on showing better information and raising the awareness of the user when it comes to applying updates and choosing a kernel.

The kernel selection window was completely revamped and is now preceded with an information screen which explains what kernels are, how to select them at boot time, what happens to DKMS modules when multiple kernels are installed etc etc..

Linux Mint no longer ships lists of fixes and lists of regressions specific to particular kernels. With so many kernel revisions, so many fixes and so many regressions happening sometimes on a daily basis, this information was extremely hard to gather. Instead, it was replaced with links to relevant sources of informations. For instance, if you select a particular kernel you can now quickly access its changelog and see all the bug reports marked against it.

Finally, the Update Manager was already configurable but it wasn’t clear how to configure it, and why. In particular, the concepts of regressions, stability and security weren’t clearly explained and users had to acquire these online. To raise awareness around these concepts and show more information, a new screen welcomes users to their update manager and asks them to select an update policy.

This screen is complemented with a help section which explains what’s at play and what to consider when choosing a policy.

Although this screen is only showed once and its main purpose is to present information to users, it can also be used as a quick way to switch between sets of preferences and it can launched from the Edit->Update Policy menu.

Better touchpad support in Cinnamon and MATE

Up until now, you could choose a scrolling method for your touchpad, between edge-scrolling (which was the default), or two-finger-scrolling, or no scrolling at all.

As more and more touchpads support the ability to scroll with two fingers, we wanted this to work out of the box in Linux Mint and without the need to configure anything. So we looked into that and we separated this into two different settings.

This was implemented in Cinnamon 3.0 and MATE 1.14. By default, both edge-scrolling and two-finger-scrolling will now be enabled and you’ll be able to disable these two features independently.

The “Natural scrolling” setting was also renamed “Reverse scrolling direction” (this will happen in version 1.16 for MATE) and enabled by default (This is in line with the way people ‘grab’ content in iOS and Android, and it was changed earlier in other popular operating systems, since Mac OS X Lion, or Windows 8. It’s configurable of course, but its default should please as many people as possible, and with all major OSes adopting this direction, it makes sense for our environments to do so as well).

New Cinnamon sound module

The Sound configuration module which was previously written in C, was completely rewritten in Python, into a brand new cinnamon-settings module.

Although the benefits of this migration aren’t directly visible to users, cinnamon-settings modules are amongst the easiest components to write for and to maintain. Python is a rapid language and the cinnamon-settings code and architecture are extremely nice to work with. Fixing bugs or troubleshooting is a breeze, adding a setting usually just means adding a single line of code…etc, etc.

Of the 33 configuration modules present in Cinnamon, only 4 remain C modules inherited from gnome-control-center: Networking, Display, Colors and Wacom tablets.

Look and feel

It’s too early to talk about the new icon and GTK themes we’re working on (even the name “Mint-Y”, for those who follow our work on github, isn’t final). I can share a few things already though:

Both Mint-X and the new theme will ship with Linux Mint 18.

The new theme is based on another popular GTK theme called “Arc”.

Application icons in the new icon theme come from a popular icon theme called “Moka”.

The screenshots in this blog post use this new theme. Although the theme isn’t final (colors/tints/contrast in particular are likely to change) it already gives us an idea of what the final result could be like. If you like or dislike this new theme, don’t hesitate to tell us why in the comments sections. And please tell us why so we can react to your feedback and use it to improve the theme.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in February: