News

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New components available

April saw the releases of Cinnamon 3.0 and MATE 1.14 which will be featured in the upcoming Linux Mint 18.

As part of the “xapps” initiative, which aims to produce cross-desktop and cross-distribution software, we also released the following applications:

A media player based on totem, called xplayer.

A text editor based on pluma, called xed.

A picture viewer based on eog, called xviewer.

A document reader based on atril, called xreader.

These 4 applications will be featured as default in Linux Mint 18, where they will replace totem, gedit, pluma, eog, eom, evince, atril and possibly ristretto.

LMDE 2 “Betsy” started to get some of the updates prepared for Linux Mint 18. Cinnamon 3.0, MATE 1.14 and the 4 Xapps mentioned above are already available in the Betsy repositories.

Changes in release management

Recently, a lot of work was done to improve and simplify release management and the production of our ISO images.

Until now our release cycle consisted in the production and testing of 18 ISO images (4 Beta, 8 Stable, 2 OEM and 4 NoCodecs) and 5 separate events (Beta, Cinnamon/MATE Stable, OEM/NoCodec, Upgrade path, Xfce/KDE). This represented a formidable amount of work but although some of it greatly contributed to making Linux Mint better, some aspects only marginally improved things. For instance, our QA process, BETA releases, and the feedback we get from them are invaluable and they are key in the quality of our distribution. Upgrade paths which were introduced in Linux Mint 17.1 are also very appreciated. In contrast, although the absence of codecs is important for magazine and distributors and OEM installation images are required for manufacturers to pre-install Linux Mint on computers they’re selling to their customers, this is an area where a lot of work is done for a very small portion of our audience.

Although the rationale made sense (codecs could be played in live sessions, the decision to have them could be made prior to downloading the ISO and thus didn’t require additional installation steps, OEM installations were clearly separated from mainstream ISOs and out of reach of novice users, particularly people previously experienced with downloading and installing Windows and who interpreted “OEM” as an opposite to “Customized”), it was very costly and it only slightly improved our distribution.

With this in mind, OEM installation disks and NoCodec images will no longer be released. Instead, similar to other distributions, images will ship without codecs and will support both traditional and OEM installations.

This will reduce our release cycle to 4 separate events and the production and testing of 12 ISO images.

Multimedia codecs can be installed easily:

From the welcome screen, by clicking on “Multimedia Codecs”

or from the main menu, by clicking on “Menu”->”Sound and Video”->”Install Multimedia Codecs”

or during the installation process, by clicking a checkbox option.

Updated package base

The package base for Linux Mint 18 is Ubuntu 16.04, a very recent Ubuntu release freshly synced from the Debian repositories. This new base provides us with a lot of updated software, new system and hardware stacks, a newer version of Xorg and newer kernels and drivers.

While porting our changes and adapting our packages to the new base, we found that many of the lower-level fixes and corrections which were applied in Linux Mint 17.x were no longer needed in Linux Mint 18. New regressions might surface as we get to know our base better, especially during the BETA phase, but for now it’s a very promising sign.

Hardware support is also much improved. One of the Asus laptops I have here was specifically purchased to tackle a number of hardware issues present in the previous base. The operating system wouldn’t run without “nomodeset” and the touchpad wasn’t properly recognized. Moving to the new base, everything works out of the box. The new nouveau (no pun intended) drivers require no special boot arguments, the touchpad works fine, the driver manager installs the NVIDIA drivers and support for optimus prime (nothing intended here either), you reboot the computer and you’ve got full acceleration and the applet is there to let you switch GPUs.

We’re not finished with hardware testing yet, but things look good so far. Another laptop used for testing is the Apple MacBook Pro and here, everything looks promising as well. The installation of the Broadcom drivers works as well as before, power and idle events seem to be well supported, it looks like screen brightness and keyboard backlight even properly get restored upon reboots now (this was something we considered but weren’t keen on fixing in Cinnamon, as it needed to happen upstream).

The issue affecting Logitech Unified Receivers, which made wireless keyboards always use an American layout in the login screen, was also fixed. And of course, the newer Linux 4.4 kernel brings support for more hardware devices and components, some of which weren’t recognized in Linux Mint 17.x.

The new theme

We talked about a new theme and we noticed two things: First, that some of you were very excited about it. And second, that some of you were also scared of the changes this would introduce. I think I’ve got good news for everybody. We decided to join the new trend and jump on the bandwagon (as people say) with a new “flat” theme called “Mint-Y”, based on the very popular “Arc” and “Moka” themes. But, we also decided not to be bold and so rather than a brutal change we’ll be introducing this new theme slowly and supporting both the old “Mint-X” and the new “Mint-Y”.

Both themes will be installed by default in Linux Mint 18, and the theme used by default will be “Mint-X”, giving Linux Mint 18 the exact same default look at Linux Mint 17.

But we’ll also continue to work on the “Mint-Y” theme, and not only leading towards Linux Mint 18, but also after its release.

You might wonder why we’re not using this new theme as default right now.. and there’s a couple of reasons:

We want to know how much you like it. Not just by looking at screenshots, but by using it, for 6 months, for a year. We don’t want to change styles just because we think it might “look” better, we’ll provide both styles to you and eventually if the day comes where a huge majority prefer the new theme, then we’ll follow that and start using it as the new default.

We want it to mature. Right now it works and there are only a couple of known issues with it, but as you, millions of users, starts using it and confronting it to the hundreds of thousands of available applications out there I’m sure you’re going to find a lot of paper cuts with it. Mint-X has been carefully tuned and improved for years thanks to your feedback. Mint-Y is brand new and it needs some of that.

We want your feedback to impact its design. Although some aspects are finalized, others are likely to change. Your feedback will help us with tints and colors. Icons in particular aren’t something we’re satisfied with (although app icons look pretty good, places, mimes, status icons are still largely undecided). We want to get people talking about this, contributing to the theme on github, experimenting with ideas and alternatives and this becomes much easier if everybody already runs Linux Mint 18 and has the theme installed.

Here is what the theme currently looks like:

Titlebars can be either light or dark, and controls can be either light, dark or using a mix of the two like in the screenshot below, where toolbars and menubars are dark but the rest of the window is light:

In the menu you can see the some of the Moka icons used for applications, and the Paper icons used for directories.

HiDPI support

A lot of work also went into porting many of our applications to GTK3/Python3/Gsettings and improving their HiDPI support. This includes most of the Mint tools but also the Xapps.

Firefox also switched and now also supports HiDPI.

We’re also considering migrating MATE 1.16 (although this is for the next cycle, in preparation for Linux Mint 18.1).

Schedule

The BETA release for Linux Mint 18 is expected in June. No particular dates will be given and the ISOs will come out “when ready”.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in March: