News – October 2014

News:

• The Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ passed quality testing and were approved for an RC release. They should become available at the end of this week. The MATE edition sports out of the box support for the Compiz window-manager (which comes pre-installed, pre-configured and which you can switch to with a click of a button). The Cinnamon edition features the new Cinnamon 2.4 desktop which features were announced on Segfault and which an early version of was made available as a preview in the Romeo section of the Linux Mint 17 repository. All 17.1 editions (including upcoming KDE and Xfce editions) also feature a huge number of improvements on tools, system layers, artwork and other aspects which they have in common. This will be described in detail with their release announcements.
• The release process hasn’t changed but because a lot of users are new to Linux and to Linux Mint, I’ll explain it very briefly here. For each edition there are two releases: The RC (“Release Candidate”) and the Stable release. Both releases pass quality testing and are fully functional. However, because the RC is the first release to be publicly available, it represents the first opportunity for users to find bugs the development team was not aware of. From experience, I can say this with certitude: Although we’re usually really happy with the quality of our RCs, we always do find and fix a lot of bugs after the RC and prior to the Stable release. In the two weeks which usually separate the two releases, we listen to feedback, we take notes for the next release and we fix a lot of bugs. In brief: 17.1 will be out in the days to come, but it’s an RC. You might think it’s really stable, and maybe it will be, but we encourage people who want to help us find bugs to try it out and people who are interested in using it for real to skip it and to wait until the end of the month to get the Stable release instead.
• If you’re using Linux Mint 17 and you want to upgrade, you do not need a fresh installation. A short time after the stable release, we’ll make an upgrade available for you which will be both safe and trivial to perform.
• On the LMDE side, work is continuing on Betsy. Debian Jessie is getting ever more stable, Cinnamon 2.4 is being ported to it and adapted to components which Linux Mint doesn’t use (GTK 3.14, Upower 0.99 and Systemd). This is facilitated of course by the fact that Cinnamon is cross-distribution and that other distributions already used these components.
• Many many thanks to all the people who are supporting us and everyone who contributes in different ways in making Linux Mint better. To the people I work with on a daily basis, moderators and developers in particular, it’s a real privilege to be working with you. We get so much done and it’s often so much fun, it’s really enjoyable. To all the people who donate, and to our sponsors, thank you for empowering us the way you do. We’ve no issues or worries getting in the way of development or project focus and that is thanks to you. To all the people who sent us ideas and are about to send us feedback… you create what we use to make Mint better release after release. I look forward to finding out what bugs you’ll uncover in this RC.