Many thanks to all the people who donated to us and who help to fund our project. Donations are down to about 60% of what they were last year, but they’re still quite high. In the first trimesters of 2015, 2016 and 2017 we respectively received $23k, $40k and $25k. Our development team has gotten bigger and our budget is being extended to include some administrators and designers. Other figures and metrics indicate we’re growing so this probably just reflects an exceptional year for donations in 2016.

Mint 13 EOL



Linux Mint 13 ‘Maya’ reached EOL (End Of Life). If you are using this release please follow the instructions posted on the forums by our administration team:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=241166

Our project is 10 years old. It had many highs and lows but if I had to point at the most significant issue we had to overcome I would point at the loss of GNOME 2 in Linux Mint 12. I remember this development cycle as one of the most intense we ever went through and the implementation of Cinnamon in Linux Mint 13 alongside a stable MATE edition was a huge relief for us. Linux Mint 13 brought a solution to that problem which unlike MGSE in Mint 12 was solid, viable and didn’t break with the past. This release is the one I remember the most fondly, it has a special meaning for me also because of its codename.

Sonya

Linux Mint 18.2 will also have a very meaningful codename and a special place in the heart of one of our developers.

I would like to address my support and my deepest sympathy to Michael Webster, one of our friends within the development team, for the loss of his wife Sonya.

I can’t think of anything more painful than losing a loved one. We feel a lot of fraternity and sadness after what happened.

It is an honor for us to be able to commemorate her name.

Farewell Sonya and to you Michael, it is a real pleasure and privilege to be developing with you. I hope you do well.

MATE 1.18 coming to LMDE

Version 1.18 of the MATE desktop environment is coming to LMDE this week. This is an important update because the entire desktop is now built against GTK3.

To prepare for this update, the team ported mintMenu to GTK3 and is now adapting themes and ironing out issues.

Big changes in Cinnamon 3.4



The Cinnamon Settings Daemon is responsible for power management, X settings, input devices, screen resolution and rotation and many other aspects of the desktop environment. In previous versions it was run as a single process called cinnamon-settings-daemon. When something went wrong it was hard to troubleshoot which part of it was responsible for the issue and if it crashed everything went down.

In the upcoming Cinnamon 3.4 the settings daemon will be split into multiple processes. Each plugin (i.e. area of responsibility) will run its own process, making it easy to identify excessive CPU or memory usage and isolating crashes to only affect a particular plugin without impacting the rest of the desktop.

Similarly, Nemo (the file manager) will be split into two separate processes. One for the desktop icons, which will run in isolation, and one for the file manager windows.

To provide improvements in terms of performance and memory usage, CJS (the Cinnamon Javascript Interpreter) was rebased on a newer version of GJS (its GNOME ancestor). It’s still compatible with mozjs24 but it also gained compatibility with mozjs38. For now it will continue to use mozjs24 in LMDE but it will run on a backported mozjs38 in Linux Mint 18.2.

Last but not least, Nemo might get a desktop grid in Cinnamon 3.4.

Cinnamon Spices website

The Spices website is now fully ready:

https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com

It supports oauth authentication via Google, Facebook and Github and lets you post comments and like your favorite Cinnamon spices.

The maintenance of the spices themselves continues on Github. We’re getting ever closer to a situation where every single applet, desklet, extension and theme “just works”. Localization support and translations are also being added on a daily basis so 3rd party elements in your desktop environment appear in your own language.

This is a huge improvement for Cinnamon because the quality of its spices has a impact on how it is perceived.

The security aspects are significant as well. On the maintenance side, we moved from a workflow where anonymous people could upload code to a website and have it run by users on their own desktop, to one where each change is tracked, reviewed and version controlled publicly on Github. On the server side, we moved from in-house accounts where we had to store emails and passwords (information we do not need ourselves) to delegating authentication to 3rd party services such as Google/Facebook/Github via oauth.

We’re delighted with all these changes. I hope you’ll enjoy the website and the spices going forward.

Many thanks to all the developers involved in all these changes, I won’t name them.. there’s quite a few 🙂

Display Manager

I’m happy to confirm that Linux Mint 18.2 will switch to the LightDM display manager.

Though, because of its close ties with Unity, GNOME, Ubuntu and indicators, unity-greeter will not be used.

It was forked to develop a similar yet independent greeter called Slick-Greeter.

Slick-Greeter looks like Unity-Greeter but provides the following benefits:

It is cross-distribution and should work pretty much anywhere.

All panel applets are embedded. No external indicators are launched or loaded.

No settings daemon are launched or loaded.

It supports HiDPI.

Sessions are validated. If a default/chosen session isn’t present on the system, the greeter scans for known sessions in /usr/share/xsessions and replaces the invalid session choice with a valid session.

Screenshots can be taken by pressing PrintScrn.

It is graphically configurable (via another project called lightdm-settings)

Other news

We’ve got both good and bad news this month… I’ll start with the bad news.

Last month we hinted at the possibility of a partnership and the manufacturing of Linux Mint laptops. This won’t happen just yet. We were seduced by the quality of the laptops but we didn’t think the design was unique enough. In particular it looked too similar to a MacBook (which is a very good thing for a laptop really, but it didn’t work for us). I’m confident we’ll do a “MintBook” one day, but we’ll take our time, it might be aluminum, it might be another material, it will certainly be a great unit the day it happens but it will also need to feel very special.

And now the good news. If you’re a fan of the series “Mr Robot” and eagerly awaiting Season 3, keep your eyes peeled the next time you see Elliot on a computer 😉

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in March: