Before we go through the news I’d like to thank you for your donations, your help and your generosity.

Codename for Linux Mint 18.3

Linux Mint 18.3 will be called “Sylvia”.

Backup Tools

The feedback you gave us last month helped us further improve our backup tool and identify the need for a system restore utility.

We talked to Tony George, the developer behind Timeshift.

Timeshift is an excellent tool which focuses on creating and restoring system snapshots. It’s a great companion to mintBackup which focuses on personal data.

The two applications will be installed by default and complement each others in Linux Mint 18.3.

We’re currently working with Tony to improve translations and desktop integration for Timeshift, add window progress support into it and improve its support for HiDPI.

If you want to help translate it please head over to https://translations.launchpad.net/linuxmint/latest/+pots/timeshift.

On Github, Timeshift is available https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift.

System Reports

At the end of the last development cycle I mentioned the idea of a tool which would bring information to users and help them troubleshoot issue. This is an ambitious project and we’re still not sure it will land in the next release, at least not fully…

I say not fully because this tool received its codename (“mintReport”), because we started implementing it and because one of its feature is now completely ready and will be shipped with Linux Mint 18.3.

That feature is the gathering of crash reports.

Using apport as a backend, a report is made whenever an application crashes.

MintReport lists these reports and generates stack traces for them:

Non-experienced users rarely know how to produce a stack trace and that information is crucial to developers when they’re not able to reproduce a bug.

This tool will make it much easier for anyone to produce these traces.

It also suggests the installation of debugging symbols (-dbg packages) when these are missing and warns in case of mismatches.

Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with mintReport and debugging symbols by default.

Cinnamon improvements

HiDPI will be enabled by default in Cinnamon 3.6.

The configuration module for cinnamon spices (applets, desklets, extensions, themes) was completely revamped:

Nemo extensions are now able to pass the name of their configuration tool to Nemo in order to get a “Configure” button in the Nemo plugins dialog:

This makes it easier to integrate extensions properly and not clutter the application menu.

Other improvements

The Driver Manager was given better HiDPI support and better detection of CPUs and microcode packages.

Synaptic dialogs (used by the Software Sources, Language Settings and the Update Manager) received support for window progress.

The toolbar of the PDF reader, Xreader, was improved. The history buttons were replaced with navigation buttons (history can still be browsed via the menubar). The two zoom buttons were switched and a zoom reset button was added to make Xreader consistent with other Xapps. As we speak Xreader is also getting support to detect your screen size, so that 100% zoom means that what you see on the screen is exactly the size the document would have on paper.

In Xplayer, the media player, the fullscreen window was improved to look cleaner and to be more consistent with the player’s window mode.

Nemo-preview received support for animated GIFs.

Translations for Nemo extensions, cinnamon-session and cinnamon-settings-daemon are now handled by cinnamon-translations (and thus will be greatly improved).

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Donations in August: