The Xfce Mint flavor has arrived after a short delay

Jun 16, 2014 08:15 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Mint developers have released the first RC for the "Qiana" Xfce flavor of their distribution, which is now available for download.

Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" Xfce RC was a little late to the party. Usually, both the KDE and Xfce flavors arrive at the same time, but this is not a rule. This time, the Xfce version was almost a week late because it had some problems that needed to be fixed.

Even if this is a Release Candidate and it's not meant for daily use, the developers didn't want to put out a version that would cause anger and frustration for the people testing it.

Just like all the previous releases for this branch of Linux Mint, the developers are preparing to offer long term support. The distro is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which has support until 2019. This means that Linux Mint will do the same.

The Mint devs said a while ago that they intended to release only operating systems based on Ubuntu LTS, at least for the time being, and the next three versions will follow the latest distro from Canonical, 14.04.

Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" Xfce RC is based on Xfce 4.10, MDM 1.6, and Linux kernel 3.13 (the one maintained by Canonical). It's likely that Mint repositories will have newer versions of the kernel, if you really want to upgrade.

According to the changelog, this release has the same improvements that all the other flavors have received. For example, the update manager has been drastically improved, the Driver Manager is now able to install drivers without a connection to the Internet (you still need the file itself), the login screen has been improved, the multi-monitor support is now much better, the HTML greeter now comes with HiDPI support, and the default login theme has some improvements as well.

Also, the "Software Sources" configuration tool has received a few UI and usability improvements, the welcome screen is no longer using Webkit, the shutdown sequence has been fixed, the artwork used in the system has been updated, and the Mint-X theme has been revamped and comes with numerous small changes.

Check the official announcement for more details about this release. Users can download Linux Mint 17 Xfce RC "Qiana" 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.