14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux Mint team announced a few moments ago the general availability of the Cinnamon and MATE editions of their latest Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" operating system.
Dubbed Sylvia, Linux Mint 18.3 is now officially out with the latest Cinnamon 3.6 and MATE 1.18 desktop environments. The distribution is powered by the Linux 4.10 kernel from Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and includes many new features and improvements, along with updated components from the upstream software repositories.
"The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” Cinnamon and MATE Editions. Linux Mint 18.3 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," reads today's announcement.
Linux Mint 18.3 ships with an improved Software Manager utility can makes it easier to install third-party apps like Spotify, Steam, Skype, Minecraft, WhatsApp, or Google Earth, support for the Flatpak universal binary format, a completely revamped Backup Tool, as well as a new tool dedicated to system snapshots, called Timeshift.
In addition, Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" includes a new System Reports to help users easier report crashes, improvements to various of the project's XApps, including the Xed text editor and Xreader PDF viewer, a more configurable login screen, out-of-the-box support for spell checking for various languages, and Redshift installed by default.
Of course, there are also various artwork improvements, better support for HiDPI displays, window-progress support in Cinnamon 3.6, which also brings HybridSleep support, animated GIF support in Nemo-Preview, a more configurable on-screen keyboard, a configuration module for Cinnamon spices, and much more.
Supported on 64-bit and 32-bit PCs until 2021
You can download Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon and Linux Mint 18.3 MATE live ISO images for either 64-bit or 32-bit computers right now from our website. However, if you're running the Beta, you can now update your installations to the final release. For now, the upgrade path from Linux Mint 18.2 or a previous version isn't available.
Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" can be installed on computers with at least 1GB of RAM, though 2GB or more is recommended for a comfortable usage. Also, you should have at least 15GB of free disk space, and a monitor supporting a 1024x768 resolution or larger. The 64-bit variant is recommended for modern BIOS and UEFI PCs.
Please note that the 32-bit variant can only be booted on BIOS systems, not UEFI. Being based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is supported upstream for five years, Linux Mint 18.3 will also receive support until 2021. For more details, you can check out the official release notes for Cinnamon and MATE editions here and here.
