14 DAY TRIAL // Clement Lefebvre has announced that the first Release Candidate for Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon is now available for download and testing.
The ISO images for Linux Mint 17 RC “Qiana” have been available for a couple of days, but now the developers have finally decided to make a proper announcement and let us know what some of the improvements that we might expect to see in the new version are.
The Cinnamon flavor is usually presented first and this is also true for the current release. The look and feel of the desktop environment hasn't changed too much since the previous release, but the devs did make some modifications to it, even if they are not visible at first.
Linux Mint 17 RC Cinnamon is based on Cinnamon 2.2, which is the latest branch of the desktop environment that was made available a short while ago. This is a piece of software developed by the same people who are also doing the distribution, and this means that it's going to be very well integrated into the OS.
The makers of Linux Mint integrated a large number of features, and one of the packages that saw the most changes is the Update Manager, which has been improved.
“It shows more information, it looks better, it feels faster, and it gets less in your way. It no longer needs to reload itself in root mode when you click on it. It no longer checks for an Internet connection or waits for the network manager and it no longer locks the APT cache at session startup. The UI was improved, the icons were modified a bit and the changelog retrieval is now much faster and more reliable,” reads the official announcement.
Also, the driver Manager is now able to install drivers without a connection to the Internet, MDM has been refined, multi-monitor support has been improved, the HTML greeter now comes with HiDPI support, the default login theme comes with a couple of new features, MDM is now able to detect the user's session and the language used, the “Software Sources” configuration tool received a few UI and usability improvements, and the Welcome Screen has been redesigned.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Linux Mint 17 RC “Qiana” Cinnamon right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.