Here are the best new features of Linux Mint 18 Xfce Edition

Aug 2, 2016 21:35 GMT  ·  By

We reported the other day on the availability for download of the long-anticipated Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" Xfce Edition operating system, and we told you that an official announcement would come shortly.

Well, it didn't take long for the rest of the download mirrors to be synchronized with the main Linux Mint servers. So today, August 2, 2016, Clement Lefebvre has informed the community about the official release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce, a special flavor of the Ubuntu-based distribution built around the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.

As usual, some of you didn't believe us when we told you that Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" Xfce Edition had hit the stable channels and that it was ready for download in its final, production-ready state. That's unfortunate, but our regular readers have already downloaded the Linux Mint 18 Xfce ISOs and are successfully using the OS on their PCs.

"The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' Xfce Edition," says Clement Lefebvre in today's announcement. "Linux Mint 18 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."

As for the new features, we've already reported in our previous stories that Linux Mint 18 Xfce is based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which means that it's powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.4 LTS series, and it ships with pretty much all the goodies implemented in the Cinnamon and MATE editions of the distro.

Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition to enter Beta soon

Now that Linux Mint 18 Xfce Edition is officially out, it's time for the Linux Mint devs to concentrate all of their efforts on finalizing the Linux Mint 18 KDE Edition, which should be available for public beta testing sometime this month. A final release of the Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE operating system could see the light of day in September 2016.

Download the Linux Mint 18 Xfce Edition Live ISO images for 64-bit and 32-bit PCs right now via our website, if you haven't already, and please try to keep in mind that the upgrade path from Linux Mint 17.3 Xfce Edition should become available in the coming days.