14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, November 13, 2016, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre published the project's newsletter for the month of November 2016 to emphasize some aspects regarding the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" operating system.
As you might know already, the Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" release is in the works, and it will ship with the recently unveiled Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, as well as the MATE 1.16. A Beta will be ready soon for public testing and early adopters, but it looks like some bugs need to be patched first before the upcoming operating system hits the streets.
"We just finished addressing some issues with MDM, and we’re currently working on a few compatibility issues which affect the Cinnamon screensaver in LMDE and in Slackware before announcing the official release of Cinnamon 3.2," said Clement Lefebvre. "Although these issues do not affect Mint 18.x [...] it’s given us more time to react to early reports coming from Arch Linux and to fix many small bugs already."
MATE 1.16 to land in the Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" and LMDE 2 "Betsy" repos
In the meantime, it looks like the MATE 1.16 desktop environment will soon hit the repositories of the rolling LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 2 "Betsy" operating system, along with the latest versions of the applications distributed as part of the XApps initiative, which will be available in the software repos of Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" as well in the coming weeks, when the Beta is out.
Even if there's a little more work to be done for Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena," which remains based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and its long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, Clement Lefebvre assures users that Linux Mint 18.1 promises to be a quality release with many goodies. Also, the Linux Mint project managed to raise a total of $9,803 during October 2016 thanks to the generous contributions of 464 donors.