14 DAY TRIAL // Today, July 28, 2016, Clement Lefebvre has published the monthly newsletter for July to informs the community about the latest happening in the Linux Mint world.
As you might know, a Beta version of the soon-to-be-released Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" Xfce edition was made available last week. Now, Clement Lefebvre informs us that the final release is expected to land very soon and that the upgrade path for Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Xfce users will be open in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, the Linux Mint team works hard on the Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition, which hasn't received a Beta milestone just yet because the upgrade from the KDE4 desktop environment used in the Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" KDE Edition to KDE Plasma 5 takes a lot of effort to become usable as your daily driver.
"There are so many differences between KDE 4 and Plasma 5, we’ve had to work on this edition as if it was a brand new product, inheriting very little from the past and with each component being added one at a time," says Clement Lefebvre. "Most of the critical issues were fixed with the exception of some compatibility issues between the screensaver, the session, and the display manager."
Looking forward to Linux Mint 18.1
In August, the Linux Mint devs will be quite busy starting work on the next major release of the Ubuntu-based operating system, Linux Mint 18.1, which should bring the latest GNU/Linux technologies from the upstream Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) distro, along with other new features. Also, they promise to release the Beta of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition.
As for those who use the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) operating system, Clement Lefebvre reminds them that the major components introduced in Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" release, such as Cinnamon 3.0, MATE 1.14, as well as the new X Apps, are already present in the LMDE 2 "Betsy" rolling release distribution. Other core components will be backported to LMDE 2 in the coming weeks.