14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre announced that the upcoming Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" operating system is the last release to ship with a KDE edition.
So, believe it or not, Linux Mint is dropping the KDE Edition after the release of Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" next month. Clement Lefebvre said that he and his team want to concentrate more on making Linux Mint a better GNU/Linux operating system, and they no longer want to focus on the Linux Mint KDE Edition.
"With Linux Mint 18.3, we’ll release one more KDE edition. I wanted this announcement to come before the release," said Clement Lefebvre. "It will hurt its popularity of course, but I wanted to give users time, either to react right now or to take their time, upgrade and adapt to this later on. I’m sure this edition will be missed, and I hope its users understand our decision."
While this may sound bad for those using the Linux Mint KDE Edition on their personal computers, it's not, because the Linux Mint developers will still provide them with updates based on the package repositories of Canonical's Kubuntu operating system. You'll still be able to install the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment from the repos though.
LMDE 3 to be dubbed "Cindy" and based on Debian Stretch
Clement Lefebvre also revealed the fact that he and his team will continue to support the Debian Edition of Linux Mint, LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition), and that they're working on the next major release, LMDE 3, which will be called "Cindy" and it's based on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system. LMDE 3 is expected to hit the streets sometime in the first quarter of 2018.
On top of that, Linux Mint is adopting Red Hat's Flatpak universal binary format for allowing users to install third-party apps that aren't available in the default repositories. Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" will be the first release of the operating system to ship with full support for Flatpaks. Both Flathub and gnome-apps repositories will be supported in Linux Mint 18.3 for installing Flatpak apps.
