Introduction

RC releases don’t usually get reviewed, so I’m quite excited to see Softpedia give it a look. Softpedia has been full of great feedback in the past (back in the days when I was maintaining it, I remember them improving the look of the KDE edition for instance). They’re also an important website in the Linux community, one of the few with bookmark by default in Firefox.

The author is Daniel Pop-Silaghi, let’s go straigth to his review: http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Look-Linux-Mint-7-RC1-110911.shtml

Happy reading everyone.

Comments:

Daniel says: “I was greeted with what instantly became my favorite login screen ever.“

–> Credits go to two artists from our community: Zwopper for the background (called Mint-Dew) and Cathbard for the logo. We also need to credit the artwork it’s based on, Shiki and Arc-Colors. There are discussions within the team about the logo being hidden. I think it looks fine but Exploder, Zwopper and Cathbard are looking into improving it, either by removing the logo or by moving it elsewhere.

Daniel says: “The wallpaper displays a green cloudy sky seen through a window covered with water drops – a great choice, as it’s non-intrusive and lets you read the white icon text without having to squint. Felicia was more on the black side so it’s nice to see more green from a minty distribution. Of course, the old themes and wallpapers are still available, as not everybody will be pleased with Gloria’s default artwork.“

–> I have to be honest with you, I thought we were taking a risk with this. I personally love the new artwork but I saw it as some kind of “love it / hate it” kind of thing. The decision was to feature it prominently in the RC release and then to go back to the previous one as default for the stable release. I hear a lot of people saying great things about it though and I don’t know what to think. I want to wait until the novelty factor is gone and see what people think before we can make up our minds. Whatever we decide these two themes will be installed by default of course so switching between them will remain extremely easy.

Daniel said: “I frugally mentioned something about the Mint Menu, but I like it so much that I have to write more about it. At first, one will think that it’s the same old expanded GNOME menu, but Linux Mint has some aces up its sleeve.“

–> The features in mintMenu aren’t well known at all by most of our users. I see people people launching Synaptic just to remove an application, I see people searching down the list for what they’re looking for.. looking at items one by one with the empty filter at the bottom, most people never use the favorites…etc. It think we need to take the aces up our sleeves and put them on the table for everybody to see. We started a screencast project which unfortunately didn’t succeed, we’ll need to take the matter into our own hands and dedicate time to make these features known.

Daniel said: “I have no doubts that Gloria will be a glorious release!“

–> Oh no, here we go with the puns. I should have thought about that before calling her like that… 🙂

All Mint tools are localized. “If” given the proper translations, they can virtually run in any language. Otherwise they just default to English.

We have a week or two before the stable release and whether these tools will support your language or show up in English instead depends entirely on you 🙂

Link to the translations: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=162

How to translate: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=162&t=25453

How to test a translation: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=162&t=25454

When replying and posting a new translation:

• Make sure to indicate which language you’re translating for
• If possible, take the time to test your translations

Many thanks in advance to all the translators. We’re hoping to use an automated tool to coordinate the translations in the future, but if we all get to it this week on the forums, we’ll quickly get to a stable release with full support for most languages.