Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Founder and lead developer, has announced that his project has started work on a GNOME 3 edition of its next major release, version 12. The new edition will initially be developed alongside the GNOME 2.32-based release which will remain as the default desktop environment of Mint. The developers had decided to stick with GNOME 2.32 because there had been "radical changes" in GNOME 3.x's desktop which had split the communities of GNOME and Mint users.

In a post on the Linux Mint blog, Lefebvre says that they will use the recent 3.2 release of GNOME as it is "more mature" than previous versions of GNOME 3. He says that the development team "can see the potential of this new desktop and use it to implement something that can look and behave better than anything based on GNOME 2". It is unlikely though that the first release of a GNOME 3 Mint will be complete: "Of course, we’re starting from scratch and this process can take some time and span across multiple releases" said Lefebvre.

In the meantime, version 12 of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution will still continue to support GNOME 2.32 as its default desktop in the standard edition of the OS. Code-named "Lisa", it will be based on the recent 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" release of Ubuntu and is expected to arrive in November. The team is also currently working with the MATE project, who are developing a fork of GNOME 2, to give users an option to switch between the two desktops on the same system, but this option may not be available until after the Linux Mint 12 release.

Linux Mint aims to be a user-friendly Linux distribution and to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media codecs. It is currently the second most popular distribution on DistroWatch.com behind Ubuntu.

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(crve)