14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre is pleased to announce today the immediate availability of the Beta milestones of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE and Xfce editions.
In this story, we're going to take a look at the Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE Beta Edition, which comes with the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment by default thanks to the collaboration with the Kubuntu team, as announced by Clement Lefebvre himself earlier this year.
The Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" operating system is about to launch soon, but right now it's in Beta stages of development, with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and Xfce editions all out and ready for public testing. All these variants are based on the latest Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and ship with the Linux 4.8 kernel.
"Linux Mint 18.2 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 experience more comfortable to use," says Clement Lefebvre in today's announcement.
Update Manager and Software Sources received various improvements
Other than shipping with the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, the Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE Beta Edition comes with the same improved Update Manager and Software Sources in-house built utilities that are also shipping in the Cinnamon and MATE editions announced last week.
There are no XApps present in this edition of Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya," and it looks like the Brasero CD/DVD burning tool is no longer installed by default. Among other noteworthy changes, we can mention that the root account is now locked by default, so you need to use the "sudo -i" command and your user password to become root.
Support for both the "markauto" and "markmanual" commands was added to the APT command-line package manager to allow marking of packages as being installed automatically or manually, respectively, and linux-firmware 1.157.10 is installed by default for better hardware support.
You can download Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE Beta Edition as either 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images right now from our website if you want to take it for a test drive, but please try to keep in mind that it's a pre-release version that should not be installed in production environments, nor used on a daily basis.
