We’ve got a lot of news to cover this month and many exciting details to share with you. Before we get started, I’d like to take a minute to thank the people who help our project grow. Many thanks to all our sponsors and all the people who send donations to us, many thanks for funding us. Special thanks also to the administration team for their work on the forums this month, the many artists who joined and participate in the design team and of course to our developers for the fantastic work we do together.

Upcoming releases

The new stable ISOs for LMDE 2 “Betsy” should be released this week.

Cinnamon Spices

Work continues in the design team on revamping the authentication, comments and rating systems to make the website compatible with the Facebook, Google and Github APIs.

The development team continues to review and improve the Cinnamon spices. Obsolete applets/desklets/themes/extensions are being removed and buggy ones are being fixed on a daily basis. Some themes which were extremely popular in the past but which hadn’t been updated for years (some of them since 2012) were updated to work with Cinnamon 3.2.

We’re getting very close to a fully functional collection of spices and thanks to the integration with Github and the automated delivery system we don’t expect spices to lag behind Cinnamon in the future anymore. Any changes required for spices to be compatible with an upcoming Cinnamon release can now be implemented directly by the development team, so spices can and should support future versions of Cinnamon even before they are released.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is going to be much better in Linux Mint 18.2.

Here is what the new Blueberry user interface looks like:

As you can see, a stack switcher was added in the toolbar and new settings were added to the application:

OBEX file transfers are now supported out of the box, so you can send files very easily over Bluetooth to your computer from any remote device.

An option was added also so you can change the Bluetooth name of your computer. That name usually defaults to your hostname or to “mint-0” and many people don’t know how to change it via the command line.

Last but not least, in addition to its cross-desktop system tray, Blueberry now provides a Cinnamon applet which uses symbolic icons and looks similar to other status applets, such as the power, sound or network applets. When this applet is present, the tray icon is hidden.

Xed

A lot of work went into Xed, the generic text editor.

“Word wrap” was made more accessible and added to the menu, so you can enable/disable that function without going in the Xed preferences.

You can also select a few lines and sort them by pressing F10, or using “Edit -> Sort Lines”.

You can now zoom in and out with the menu, keyboard shortcuts or even the mouse wheel to modify the size of the text.

The search now supports regular expressions.

You can now switch between tabs with the mouse wheel.

Python extensions are now supported and porting Gedit 3 extensions to Xed is very easy.

And as you might have noticed in the screenshot above, Xed features really exciting visual improvements. For instance, it comes with smart side and bottom bars which automatically adjust to the loaded content and which you can hide or show with a click of a button.

The ability to prefer dark themes was added, so if you’re using Mint-Y-Darker for instance, you can select whether your text editor should be light or dark.

Xplayer

The media player, Xplayer, also received improvements to its user interface.

All the controls and the seeker bar were placed on the same line and the statusbar was removed to make the application more compact.

You can now control the playback speed with the same keyboard shortcuts as in MPV, so you can make your own slow motion replays, or watch lengthy matches in about half the time it would take.

Subtitles files are now loaded automatically but subtitles are also now hidden by default. You can switch them ON or OFF, or cycle through subtitles tracks by pressing “S” on the keyboard.

You can also cycle through audio/language tracks by pressing “L” on the keyboard.

The OSD (on-screen display) was fixed and now shows the audio track or subtitle track or playback speed you selected, or your position in the movie when seeking forward or backward.

Many bugs were fixed and just like in Xed, the ability to prefer dark themes was added.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in January: