It ships with the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel

Jan 5, 2017 13:38 GMT  ·  By

A few moments ago, the Linux Mint team happily announced the release and general availability of the Beta milestone of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" Xfce operating system for personal computers.

Borrowing the internals from its bigger brothers, namely Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" Cinnamon and MATE editions, the Xfce flavor of the recently unveiled Linux Mint 18.1 distribution is based on Canonical's Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and built upon the lightweight Xfce 4.12 desktop environment.

Under the hood, it's powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel with linux-firmware 1.157.5, just like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is, includes the MDM (Mint Display Manager) 2.0 login manager, as well as all the in-house built applications distributed as part of the X-Apps initiative. These include Xviewer, Xreader, Xplayer, and Xed.

"Linux Mint 18.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use," said Clement Lefebvre in the release notes, from where you'll learn all about the new Xfce flavor of Linux Mint 18.1.

Whisker Menu upgraded to version 1.6.2 with new features

Those of you using a previous version of Linux Mint Xfce should know that the application menu used in the GNU/Linux distribution is powered by Whisker Menu, which was upgraded to version 1.6.2 in this Beta release, bringing keyboard navigation support for categories, program descriptions in tooltips, and web search actions.

Another interesting change is the fact that the rhythmbox-plugin-tray-icon package now properly integrates with the Xfce and MATE editions as Linux Mint devs are now involved in its development. The many improvements implemented to the Update Manager, Software Sources, Language Settings, and Input Methods are also present.

As expected, the artwork has been improved as well and it looks like the "folder-color-switcher" now supports theme inheritance. You can download Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" Xfce Beta Edition right now from our website, but please try to keep in mind that it's still a development release and there are a bunch of known issues.