14 DAY TRIAL // Today being the last day of April, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre published the monthly newsletter of the project to inform the community about what's coming for the popular, Ubuntu-based distribution in May.
The developer starts by warning those who still use the Linux Mint 13 "Maya" release that it reached end of life as it was based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), which also reached end of life on April 28, 2017. Therefore, Linux Mint 13 will no longer receive security updates so you must upgrade to a newer release.
Then he continued by revealing the codename of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.2 release, which will be "Sonya," in honor of the late wife of Michael Webster, one of the developers involved in the Linux Mint project and other related components, including Cinnamon and Nemo.
"I would like to address my support and my deepest sympathy to Michael Webster, one of our friends within the development team, for the loss of his wife Sonya," said Clement Lefebvre. "I can’t think of anything more painful than losing a loved one. We feel a lot of fraternity and sadness after what happened."
Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment comes with big changes
The biggest new features of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" operating system will be the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment, which is currently in development and promises to introduce big changes, such as the fact that the settings daemon and Nemo file manager will both be split into multiple processes.
For the setting daemon, it will help users identify and terminate components of the operating system that have excessive memory or CPU usage without having to reboot the entire system, and Nemo will have two processes, one for the desktop icons and the other for the file manager windows.
Furthermore, it looks like Nemo could receive a desktop grid in Cinnamon 3.4, the CJS (Cinnamon Javascript Interpreter) component was rebased on a newer version of GNOME's GJS, and the LightDM display manager is being adopted as default login manager shipping with the Slick-Greeter greeter (see the screenshot attached).
While Slick-Greeter might look like Ubuntu's Unity-Greeter, it appears to be cross-distribution, it supports HiDPI, embeds all panel applets without loading or launching external indicators, nor the settings daemon, validates sessions before launching them, allows screen captures with the PrtScr key, and is graphically configurable.
Other than that, it looks like the MATE 1.18 desktop environment is coming soon to the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) operating system, probably next week. Both Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" and the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment are being heavily developed these days, and a release date was not yet set.