14 DAY TRIAL // Clement Lefebvre has had the great pleasure of announcing the official availability of the Beta release of the upcoming Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition operating system.
A couple of days ago we had an exclusive first look at Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition, thanks to a news tip from one of our regular readers, but we also gave users the possibility of downloading the ISO images and take the upcoming GNU/Linux distribution for a test drive on their personal computers so they can see for themselves what's new.
As we've told you then, Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition is based on the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) technologies, which means that it's using the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, the KDE Plasma 5.6.5 desktop environment, as well as the KDE Applications 15.12.3 software suite. Additionally, the distro now uses the SDDM login manager and a few popular open source applications.
These include the LibreOffice office suite and Mozilla Firefox web browser, and among the KDE apps injected into the ISO image, we can mention Dolphin, Amarok, K3b, Kontact, Konsole, digiKam, Kate, Gwenview, Okular, Skanlite, Dragon Player, KTorrent, Ark, KMail, and Konversation. Popular apps like Steam, Spotify, Dropbox, and Minecraft are also available via Software Manager.
Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition ships in the first week of September
Among other new features included in the Beta release of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition, we can mention HiDPI support improvements, GTK3 support for Mozilla Firefox and many in-house built apps, support for OEM installations, Gufw firewall integration, lots of artwork improvements, and many enhancements to Update Manager and various other core components.
Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition Beta is now available for download as 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images. When testing, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not yet ready for production use. The final release of the Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition operating system should be available sometime in the first week of September 2016, but no official release date has been published at the moment.