The developers have decide that major updates will occur every couple of years

May 14, 2014 19:35 GMT  ·  By

The new Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Release Candidate is out and it’s based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The interesting fact is that the next few versions will also use the same release as a base.

The Linux Mint developers have decided to use only Ubuntu LTS releases, which means that through the next couple of years all the new Mint versions will be based on the same operating system.

“The decision was made to stick to LTS bases. In other words the development team will be focused on the very same package base used by Linux Mint 17 for the next 2 years. It will also be trivial to upgrade from version 17 to 17.1, then 17.2 and so on.”

“Important applications will be backported and we expect this change to boost the pace of our development and reduce the amount of regressions in each new Linux Mint release,” said Clement Lefebvre on the Linux Mint blog.

This not exactly surprising, but it means that Linux Mint will become a distribution that is much more oriented towards stability. It also means that it will benefit from the same extended support as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, until 2019.

You can download Linux Mint 17 RC “Qiana” Cinnamon and Linux Mint 17 RC “Qiana” MATE 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.