The Linux Mint project is alive and kicking, despite the unfortunate "hacking" issues that happened at the end of February 2016, and team leader Clement Lefebvre talks today about the upcoming features in Linux Mint 18.

As you might very well be aware, the major Linux Mint 18 release is coming this year as a free upgrade to existing Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" users, bringing a ton of new features, improvements to the in-house built apps, as well as the latest versions of the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments.

First of all, the big news is that Linux Mint 18 will offer Cinnamon 3.0 and MATE 1.14 flavors. While Cinnamon 3.0 is still in the heavy development, the MATE 1.14 major release was announced a couple of days ago with numerous enhancements in various areas, including updated GTK+3 support.

"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," says Clement Lefebvre in the monthly newsletter.

Update Manager improvements, better touchpad support

Linux Mint 18 will ship with a new version of the Update Manager software, the default graphical package manager of the distribution, which sports HiDPI support, stack widgets and subtle animations support for the main and preferences screens, support for alternative themes, as well as new settings for selecting kernel updates.

Moreover, there will be a revamped kernel selection window, which will give newcomers a lot of info on the kernels available, how DKMS modules work with multiple kernels, etc. Also, for newcomers, the Update Manager now has a first-time configuration screen.

Cinnamon 3.0 and MATE 1.14 to offer better scrolling support

It appears to have already landed in the MATE 1.14 desktop environment, but better scrolling support is also coming to Cinnamon 3.0 in the form of the ability to scroll with two fingers. Additionally, the "Natural scrolling" setting has been renamed to "Reverse scrolling direction" in Cinnamon 3.0 and will land in MATE 1.16 too later this year.

Other than that, Cinnamon 3.0 will offer a new sound configuration dialog, completely rewritten in Python. As for the new icons and theme, Linux Mint 18 should ship with both Mint-X and new Mint-Y (not the final name) themes, the latter being based on the popular Arc GTK theme and Moka icon set.

Update Manager improvements

New first-time Update Manager configuration screen