Monthly News – February 2017

We’ve got a lot of news to cover this month and many exciting details to share with you. Before we get started, I’d like to take a minute to thank the people who help our project grow. Many thanks to all our sponsors and all the people who send donations to us, many thanks for funding us. Special thanks also to the administration team for their work on the forums this month, the many artists who joined and participate in the design team and of course to our developers for the fantastic work we do together.

Upcoming releases

The new stable ISOs for LMDE 2 “Betsy” should be released this week.

Cinnamon Spices

Work continues in the design team on revamping the authentication, comments and rating systems to make the website compatible with the Facebook, Google and Github APIs.

The development team continues to review and improve the Cinnamon spices. Obsolete applets/desklets/themes/extensions are being removed and buggy ones are being fixed on a daily basis. Some themes which were extremely popular in the past but which hadn’t been updated for years (some of them since 2012) were updated to work with Cinnamon 3.2.

We’re getting very close to a fully functional collection of spices and thanks to the integration with Github and the automated delivery system we don’t expect spices to lag behind Cinnamon in the future anymore. Any changes required for spices to be compatible with an upcoming Cinnamon release can now be implemented directly by the development team, so spices can and should support future versions of Cinnamon even before they are released.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is going to be much better in Linux Mint 18.2.

Here is what the new Blueberry user interface looks like:

As you can see, a stack switcher was added in the toolbar and new settings were added to the application:

OBEX file transfers are now supported out of the box, so you can send files very easily over Bluetooth to your computer from any remote device.

An option was added also so you can change the Bluetooth name of your computer. That name usually defaults to your hostname or to “mint-0” and many people don’t know how to change it via the command line.

Last but not least, in addition to its cross-desktop system tray, Blueberry now provides a Cinnamon applet which uses symbolic icons and looks similar to other status applets, such as the power, sound or network applets. When this applet is present, the tray icon is hidden.

Xed

A lot of work went into Xed, the generic text editor.

“Word wrap” was made more accessible and added to the menu, so you can enable/disable that function without going in the Xed preferences.

You can also select a few lines and sort them by pressing F10, or using “Edit -> Sort Lines”.

You can now zoom in and out with the menu, keyboard shortcuts or even the mouse wheel to modify the size of the text.

The search now supports regular expressions.

You can now switch between tabs with the mouse wheel.

Python extensions are now supported and porting Gedit 3 extensions to Xed is very easy.

And as you might have noticed in the screenshot above, Xed features really exciting visual improvements. For instance, it comes with smart side and bottom bars which automatically adjust to the loaded content and which you can hide or show with a click of a button.

The ability to prefer dark themes was added, so if you’re using Mint-Y-Darker for instance, you can select whether your text editor should be light or dark.

Xplayer

The media player, Xplayer, also received improvements to its user interface.

All the controls and the seeker bar were placed on the same line and the statusbar was removed to make the application more compact.

You can now control the playback speed with the same keyboard shortcuts as in MPV, so you can make your own slow motion replays, or watch lengthy matches in about half the time it would take.

Subtitles files are now loaded automatically but subtitles are also now hidden by default. You can switch them ON or OFF, or cycle through subtitles tracks by pressing “S” on the keyboard.

You can also cycle through audio/language tracks by pressing “L” on the keyboard.

The OSD (on-screen display) was fixed and now shows the audio track or subtitle track or playback speed you selected, or your position in the movie when seeking forward or backward.

Many bugs were fixed and just like in Xed, the ability to prefer dark themes was added.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Platinum Sponsors:
Private Internet Access
Gold Sponsors:
Linux VPS Hosting
Silver Sponsors:

Acunetix
Sucuri
Bronze Sponsors:
Vault Networks *
AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting
7L Networks Toronto Colocation *
Goscomb
BGASoft Inc
David Salvo
Milton Security Group
Sysnova Information Systems
Community Sponsors:

Donations in January:

A total of $9,670 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 483 donors:

$1337 (2nd donation), Shawn C aka “citypw
$108, Oliver Z.
$108, Paul S. E. aka “Paul”
$100 (13th donation), Anon.
$100 (4th donation), Billy Bob Roach
$100 (2nd donation), Nathalie W.
$100 (2nd donation), Bruce H.
$100, William W.
$100, Philip T.
$100, Harold H.
$100, Don Jr.
$77 (19th donation), Wolfgang P.
$75, Roger R.
$75, Fabiano P.
$65 (2nd donation), Jonas H.
$60, Frank R.
$60, James L.
$59, Thomas Ö.
$54 (5th donation), Claude M.
$54, Josef S.
$54, Arnold D.
$54, Stefan P.
$54, Fernando M. R.
$54, Xtant Logic Ltd aka “Xtant Audio
$53 (2nd donation), Jorge R. R.
$50 (24th donation), Go Live Lively
$50 (8th donation), Andrew M.
$50 (6th donation), Robert H. B.
$50 (5th donation), Christopher D.
$50 (3rd donation), José W. F. J.
$50 (2nd donation), George M.
$50 (2nd donation), Tod D.
$50 (2nd donation), Fred W.
$50 (2nd donation), Robert E. H.
$50, Juei C. C.
$50, Tom D.
$50, Allen G.
$50, George V. R.
$50, Mark F.
$50, Steven Hodder
$50, Charles W.
$50, Craig D.
$50, Roderick W.
$44.8, Systemutvikler R. S.
$40.78 (2nd donation), Steve W.
$40 (4th donation), Tomas S.
$40, Kamil R.
$40, Arvid R.
$38, Ingolf B.
$35 (4th donation), Joe K.
$35 (3rd donation), Jeff S.
$35, Toby L.
$35, Ursula C.
$32 (83th donation), Olli K.
$32 (3rd donation), Lars-gunnar S.
$32 (2nd donation), Ian W.
$32 (2nd donation), Tommaso P.
$32 (2nd donation), Mark W.
$32, Michael H.
$32, Arnd S.
$32, Christian M.
$30 (10th donation), Geoff_P
$30 (3rd donation), Jason H
$30 (3rd donation), Tony V. aka “Troot
$30 (3rd donation), Bruce N.
$30, Mark D.
$28 (2nd donation), Dirk S.
$27 (5th donation), Roger D. P. aka “Linux Users Group Monitor Niel
$27, Andre C.
$27, Matthias H.
$27, Thierry B.
$27, Roman L.
$25 (66th donation), Ronald W.
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$25 (7th donation), Larry I.
$25 (5th donation), Jeffery J.
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$25 (2nd donation), Michael K. S.
$25 (2nd donation), Ian P.
$25 (2nd donation), Stephen M.
$25, Ricardo G.
$25, Juan D.
$25, Michael C.
$25, Blair N.
$25, Graham D.
$25, Andrei P.
$25, Pacific Autotronic Systems, LLC
$25, David W.
$25, Frank R. J.
$23, Andreas E.
$22 (9th donation), Doriano G. M.
$22 (7th donation), Theo Stauffer aka “Theo”
$22 (7th donation), Alessandro P.
$22 (7th donation), Pentti T.
$22 (4th donation), Michael S.
$22 (3rd donation), Matthew Butler aka “goldberg@mint”
$22 (3rd donation), U. Flad aka “Duc Racer”
$22 (3rd donation), Alan R.
$22 (2nd donation), John A.
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$22 (2nd donation), Nurettin G.
$22 (2nd donation), Tony L. aka “tone39”
$22 (2nd donation), Zahari D. K.
$22, George P.
$22, Marcel H.
$22, Mark G.
$22, Andreas M.
$22, Carsten K.
$22, Craig M.
$22, Henricus V. L.
$22, Tamas K.
$22, Clemens H.
$22, Wolfgang H.
$22, Nikolaus N.
$22, Bruno C.
$22, Didik S.
$22, Peter L.
$22, Olivier J.
$22, Bruno Z.
$22, Tommi R.
$22, Tor A. N.
$22, Xavier Holzl aka “XavierHolzl”
$22, Monika M.
$22, T. H.
$22, Patrick H.
$22, Alberto M. H.
$22, Richard D.
$22, Carlos L. D. C.
$22, Stefan N.
$22, Erno I.
$22, Juan R.
$22, TOnline LDA
$21, Andrzej O. aka “Mintyman”
$20 (5th donation), James A.
$20 (4th donation), Ray P.
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$20 (4th donation), Greg W.
$20 (3rd donation), Larry P.
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$20, Heath P.
$20, Zeshan B.
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$20, Michael K.
$20, Alexander Z.
$20, phaendal
$20, David T. aka “Crimson”
$20, Glenn C.
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$20, Zhichang Y.
$20, Lance B.
$20, Charles G.
$20, Dirk H.
$20, Stephen M.
$20, TJ Nelson
$20, James C.
$20, Michael H.
$20, Ashley S.
$20, Jeffrey J.
$20, Andrew S.
$20, Willows A. S. M. C.
$20, Greta G.
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$19, Alejandro S.
$18.5 (6th donation), Marcin Ziółkowski aka Mario Nesta
$17, Lucian B.
$16 (5th donation), Carsten Wehner
$16 (2nd donation), Klaus K.
$16, Patrick S.
$16, Domenico M.
$16, Rob T.
$16, John H.
$16, Hannah V.
$15 (4th donation), Dental SEO Services
$15 (4th donation), Stephen C.
$15 (3rd donation), Vero Beach Dentist
$15 (3rd donation), Tyler B.
$15 (2nd donation), Kirk W.
$15, Mauricio López aka “damonh”
$15, Benjamin P.
$15, Caroline R.
$15, Delaney C.
$13.37, Smiling Cactus Gifts, LLC
$13 (9th donation), Anonymous
$13, Lucas B.
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$13, Sigrid K.
$13, Alexandru D.
$12 (70th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
$12 (16th donation), Jobs Hiring Near Me
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$12 (5th donation), Raymond M. (retired)
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$11, Christian F.
$11, Edel H.
$11, Teodar G. K.
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$11, Sven B.
$11, Carsten S.
$11, Hans-werner B.
$11, Dirk S.
$11, Niko C.
$11, Grégoire H.
$11, Gerhard S.
$11, Csaba N.
$11, Arkadijs K.
$11, Christoph D.
$11, Dimitrios P.
$11, Birger T.
$10 (14th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (10th donation), Larry J.
$10 (8th donation), Antoine T.
$10 (8th donation), Hormis K.
$10 (7th donation), Michel C.
$10 (6th donation), Curtis M.
$10 (6th donation), Frank K.
$10 (5th donation), Car Rentals Near Me
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$10 (5th donation), Paul O.
$10 (4th donation), Car Rentals Near Me
$10 (4th donation), anonymous aka “victorsk”
$10 (3rd donation), Agenor R.
$10 (3rd donation), Stephen C.
$10 (3rd donation), G&A
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$10 (2nd donation), William B. Z.
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$10, Santiago A.
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$10, Headphonesrepair.com
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$10, Brian W.
$8 (2nd donation), Helmut S.
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$7.5 (2nd donation), L L.
$7.25, Andrzej P.
$7 (7th donation), CV Smith
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$6 (2nd donation), Oliver Q. aka “oqv”
$6, Mark W.
$6, Monika L.
$5 (29th donation), LM aka “LinuxMint
$5 (10th donation), Eugene T.
$5 (7th donation), Snorri Gylfason
$5 (6th donation), Risikolebensversicherung-Vergleich
$5 (5th donation), Korneliusz M. aka “audiokor
$5 (5th donation), Cathi I.
$5 (4th donation), Dean A. aka “LinuxGeek”
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$5 (2nd donation), Crossword Solver
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$5, Robert G.
$5, John D. aka “siliconjohn”
$5, Weyman S.
$5, Sourav B. aka “rmad17
$5, Matthew O.
$5, aka “Cachafaz”
$5, Edward S.
$5, Fabian Peter Hammerle
$5, Mattias W.
$5, Voicu R.
$5, Jesus F. E. F.
$5, Richard K.
$5, Julius K.
$5, Christoph C.
$5, Giorgio F. L.
$5, Andre A.
$5, Adrien R.
$5, Hans H.
$5, Gyu H. O. aka “karistuck
$5, Hans-peter P.
$5, John C. M.
$5, Jose A. S. S.
$5, Damian C.
$5, Arturas C.
$5, Juan P.
$5, Samuel aka “LEGOlord208
$5, Mika J.
$5, Emanuele S.
$5, Jozo M.
$5, Yehuda D. aka “uda
$5, Khaled M.
$5, Bartłomiej L.
$5, Otto Skultety aka “ottos”
$5, Simonetta E.
$5, Olivier R.
$5, Jamie P.
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$5, Francisco G. P.
$5, Vadimír P.
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$5, Ivan B.
$4, Agnieszka Z.
$3.78 (6th donation), Matthew B.
$3.75 (7th donation), Matthew B.
$3.5 (2nd donation), Another Canadian happily enjoying Linux
$3 (26th donation), Kouji K. aka “杉林晃治
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$2.5, Catalin C. aka “Canizares”
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$40.2 from 40 smaller donations

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140 comments

  1. Hi Clem, Wonderful developments! Thanks for all the hard work by team!

    One thing that I wish as a Cinnamon user is network manager improvements! Ex: WiFi refresh is missing.

    Please can this be added to Roadmap? 🙂
    https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/2746

    Edit by Clem: I’ll add it to the roadmap. I can’t promise anything but it will be looked at.

  2. Congrats Clem and congrats Linux Mint team.
    These improvement looks really nice. Looking forward to use them.

    Thanks a lot for the regex search in xed.

    KDB

  3. Very exciting changes on the way to LM 18.2!

    Something that I would like to point here is that you should consider implementing an option to choose between the old cinnamon menu effects and the new ones. To me, the new kde-like effects look much better, but it seems like they run at 10-15fps on every machine that I have installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE. That makes the overall experience feel sluggish for no reason, and rather than disabling all the effects I’d prefer an option to switch at the old ones instead.

    I might be missing something though. Keep up the awesome work!

  4. I REEEEALLY have to wonder, why on earth if i have a video with 1) separate subtitles 2) loaded automatically -you turn them off? I should turn them off. But if they are there, don’t you think it’s quite likely because i want or need them?

    Edit by Clem: Not at all. I don’t want to promote these websites here so I won’t give names, but if I look at two of the most popular torrent source for movie downloads, one is shipping movies in English with embedded subtitles, and the other is shipping directories containing both the movie file and its subtitle file in English. A vast majority of people speak English natively or are fluent in English and do not want subtitles, so I don’t want a majority of people to always have to turn them OFF. Instead, I’d rather have a minority turn them ON “when” they need them, or resort to the preferences to turn them on automatically (yes, it is configurable).

  5. That’s great and all, but I have to admit what I /really/ want is for the flakey NM/NMApplet to be finally fixed. It’s one of those death by papercuts things. I don’t want to have ‘sudo service network-manager restart’ memorized through habit anymore.

    Edit by Clem: That’s upstream from us unfortunately. You’re talking about the one in MATE?

  6. One thing I don’t like with xed (and the other xapps) is the file open/close screen – I would prefer it to be the same as my file manager.

    I also find xed to be slow eg to ctrl-home or ctrl-end, it noticably scrolls rather than being instantaneous like pluma, also holding a key down, there is a definite run-on when you release it.

    Edit by Clem: I remember looking into that. It’s down to GtkSourceView and the difference between GTK2 and GTK3, there’s little we can do here I’m afraid, and it’s only a matter of time before Pluma also ships in GTK3.

  7. thank you guys for every little improvement you do on cinnamon mint.
    for me it’s the only linux i can just use out of the box without spending hours to read forums and wikis.
    thanks for this!

    (only thing i added is the icing task manager applet, but basically i’m also fine with the default solution)

  8. I just checked my favorite old themes & found that they were working again. Thanks for the effort to update things like the tyr himinn/jord themes. I miss the ‘box pointer’ a bit but otherwise they have the same sleek looks as they always had with just the right amount of transparency. I’m looking forward to playing with the other improvements as well.

    Edit by Clem: It’s an ongoing effort. I see commits there every day, not just from the team but also via PRs from 3rd party developers. We only kept a fraction of the themes that were there but they’re in good care now and so are the applets, desklets and extensions. It’s night and day already compared to what it was before. When the authentication revamp lands, we’ll also hopefully see a better ranking system so better spices will more easily make it to the top.

  9. I use Xed constantly. (LMDE Mate). looking very good. It now matches the finesse of Pluma. Looking forward to having the new enhancements pushed up.
    I would like to find a way to set some defalts, but maybe I don’t see the obvious 😉

    Thanks again for the new ISOs, much update time is saved.

  10. Clem, as you’re working on the Spices area, is there any way to add in a couple features, maybe for future Cinnamon versions? First, it’d be nice to be able to sort Spices by compatible Cinnamon version, or even hide the ones that aren’t compatible with the version you’re using. Second would be adding an auto-update option to Cinnamon, so new Spices are kept fresh and up-to-date without the extra work of checking them all the time. Thanks!

  11. Having had way to may GUINNESS tonight I will make this short. My wonky Intel NUC was saved tonight by replacing the SSD with a previous install from another computer. Merci mon ami and thank you team green.

  12. thank you so much for all those magnificent updates. i just hope that theres a Linux Mint version for ipad or any other tablet that we can also install on our devices.

  13. Thanks Clem for implementing the subtitle toggle switch on Xplayer. This would really be very convenient and helpful. But may I know when we can expect this feature to be released? With LM18.2? Or before that?

    Regardless, looking forward to using this feature. Thanks again.

  14. I have a question.
    Is it possible that the theme manager in 17.x can be updated to work with the new spices site?
    I know it is old but, some people(like me) still use it on some machines.
    BUT, whatever you do, do not add the new Cinnamon version.

  15. Just want to say a big thank you to the entire mint team for making an OS that has served me well now for 2 years since moving from windows.I’ve had my glitches and the odd drama along the way, usually of my own making, but I’ve learnt a lot and am now proud to say that all 6 pc’s in the house are now open source – 3 mint KDE and 3 openelec. Keep up the good work and thanks again.

  16. Hi Clem,

    Great to hear that that Bluetooth is going to be much better in 18.2. Whilst I have been able to send a file from my computer (Dell Inspiron 15 with LM Cinnamon 18.1) to my Smasung Galaxy S4 I have never been able to transfer anything from my S4 to this computer. Just always says on the S4 “File not Sent” and in the phone notifications “Sending Failed – Unable to transfer file”.

    Is this a bug that will be fixed in 18.2 or am I missing something like needing to setup specific permission on the computer. The devices have been paired so I am at a bit of a lost – have tried everything.

    Thank you and the team for all the hard work.

    Edit by Clem: Yes, that’s exactly what we tackled there.

  17. Hi Clem,

    first of all, thank you and the other developers for your great work. I use Linux Mint every day and are happy to see it constantly evolving.

    For the next release, please consider:

    1) Battery applet: Make it possible to see the current battery percentage in vertical panels.
    (You could also work with different colors, too. For example, a red icon below 20% and a yellow icon over 80%, because batteries are best used between 20% and 80% and therefore, you could have a positive influence on battery life of laptops).

    2) An applet that opens a folder and its subfolder by hovering over the name (just like in Windows, I think there is such thing in MATE and KDE, too).

    3) When creating a shortcut on the desktop, for example to \documents\personal\letters, the folder path reads \desktop\shortcut to letters. When I now move up in the structure, I come back to desktop, but I would like to be in \documents\personal.

    4) A working desktop grid that permits icons to overlay.

    Thank you.

  18. Hi Clem,

    the only way to connect my bluetooth speakers with Mint 18 was to completely delete Blueberry and install Blueman. Before doing this, I had tried everything with no luck.
    Now, I understand that Blueberry is part of Cinnamon, but I think that the strength of Linux should be to take the best where available. Have you considered switching to Blueman?
    Blueberry just seems too buggy. Mint 18 has been out for many months, yet Blueberry still shows your computer as “Bastien’s computer”. Such a simple bug has never been fixed and it’s still present in 18.1. For many users, the connection to the BT speakers simply doesn’t work and the only way to fix it is switch to Blueman. What’s more, the interface of Blueman is more intuitive and it has much more features.
    I appreciate your wonderful work, but the risk here is that new potential users will consider Mint as buggy and not ready for daily usage. I myself was considering to switch to another distro, after years of Mint, as I wasn’t able to use my BT speakers. I waited for 18.1 and it didn’t solve the problem. Then I started considering switching again. Today I found this solution somehow. It’s good that you’re revisiting Blueberry’s interface, but it also needs to be bug free.

    Edit by Clem: Both Blueman and Blueberry are very young projects and they emerged as the result of gnome-bluetooth going from a standalone tool which was used in multiple DEs to a configuration module which can only be used in GNOME. They tackle the problem in very different ways, Blueman is a complete solution, from scratch, whereas Blueberry is a frontend to the existing gnome-bluetooth. Blueberry itself is pretty much bug-free and its scope is very minimal compared to gnome-bluetooth or blueman. For every new base, we evaluate the state of Blueman and at the time of Mint 18, it was unfortunately not stable enough for us to ship it by default. You might have had better success connecting to your device with it than with gnome-bt (which is what is used when you use blueberry), but mileage varies greatly and we’ve seen many people report the exact opposite. Now, when it comes to “Bastien’s Computer”, we’re talking about Bastien Nocera here, who develops gnome-bluetooth. The issue is that gnome-bluetooth doesn’t always properly detect the adapter alias and the default value in there is “Bastien’s Computer”. The Bastien in question doesn’t see what’s wrong with this https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755967 and so this is both upstream from us and unlikely to get fixed. I don’t expect you to be an expert and I can understand why you would assume a bug is on us when it’s part of Mint or Cinnamon, or Blueberry (which isn’t part of Cinnamon by the way), but it’s frustrating as you can see for me to see people wonder why WE don’t seem to care where we’re unable to fix issues we have no control on. Now, with that said, and I didn’t mention it here, but it’s done so I may as well now… we did go the extra mile while working on Blueberry and we’re now not only using the gnome-bluetooth widget or patching gnome-bluetooth to behave correctly, but we’re also introspecting that widget and forcing its label to show the correct value. That OBEX agent we added, that’s also something gnome-bluetooth “should” provide. As you can see we’re very well aware of the situation when it comes to bluetooth, and the one thing we care about is to make it work well and out of the box for the majority of you. So yes, we think Blueberry is a better solution, yes we’re aware OBEX didn’t work and Bastien’s notorious bug freaked quite a few people on the Internet, yes we’re fixing all that, that’s precisely what this is about, and no you’re not getting Blueberry because it’s some part of Cinnamon (we consider it an Xapp, cross-DE), we’ll continue to assess the state of Blueman and if one day it makes sense to switch to it, we will. There are no guarantees we’ll be able to continue to use GNOME-BT going forward and there are non guarantees Blueman will continue to grow and work well for us either, we want to support both scenarios and not put all our eggs in the same basket. I’m quite delighted we came up with Blueberry and I’m quite delighted to see Infirit work on Blueman, to be completely honest with you, if it wasn’t for these two projects you’d have very little options when it comes to BT right now.

    2nd Edit by Clem: This is technical, but here goes: https://github.com/linuxmint/blueberry/commit/0dcc541dbdf56cd5f0357f3ee1b91913c7ee371e. As you can see in this commit the UI will no longer show the state of OBEX in gnome-bluetooth and the adapter name as detected by gnome-bluetooth (which equates to Bastien’s computer when it fails to find it). It will now show the state of Blueberry’s own OBEX support and the adapter name as detected directly by Bluez. Blueberry is still quite a small project, until now it was basically a frontend to gnome-bluetooth and rfkill. It’s now relying directly on Bluez for OBEX and getting/setting the adapter name. I can’t tell you how long that’s going to work and if we’ll eventually switch a full Bluez frontend such as Blueman (we’re obviously not going to replicate the entire scope of that project) but the reason we have this in the roadmap, the reason we’re working on it in the first place, and the reason we’re doing all that is because we heard your feedback on Bluetooth and we want it to work well in the next release.

  19. Hi Clem,

    first off, great job on the bluetooth improvements! Thanks for all your hard work.

    I was wondering if there are any plans to add a more varied colour scheme to Mint-Y. Right now I’m using Mint-X Aqua, Y looks very modern but I’m no huge fan of green.

    Edit by Clem: Yes, but down the line. Before we come up with color variations we’ll want to finalize the icons and the support for dark themes. That support is getting better and better every time we work on an Xapp by the way, and the icons are on the roadmap, so fingers crossed that makes it in Mint 18.2. When it all works well, then we’ll derive multiple color variations.

  20. Hopefully the new bluetooth interface will keep the bluetooth settings. It’s annoying that you cant permanently turn off bluetooth (defaults on at boot).

    Edit by Clem: Afaik we soft-lock the adapter when you switch it OFF via Blueberry. Can you check with “rfkill list bluetooth”? Check also the state of the rfkill service in systemd “sudo systemctl status systemd-rfkill” to see if it’s enabled. It sound like a boot/systemd issue.

  21. #24

    Please implement Scott’s suggestion at comment 24. Having bluetooth on wastes battery charge if not used and people using the computer forget to turn it off every time the computer is turned on.

    Thank you

    Edit by Clem: I’ll have a look to see if I can reproduce the issue.

  22. All of that is good to hear. Re the ‘spices’: next stop the MDM login screens, perhaps? Some of them are considerably buggy and few look great. I do like the look of the ‘MDModern’ one, but is has severe keyboard lag and even seems simply to drop some keyboard input entirely. Also – at least on my system – the option to delete login themes just doesn’t work.

    Thanks.

  23. Hi, Clem? When are you develop a fully-dimensional antivirus, likewise Microsoft Security Essentials? If for now, all things of LM is patiently in.

  24. Good Morning ,

    Clem,

    Congratulations on the Linux Mint project.

    I have a humble suggestion for Linux Mint Cinnamon.

    The team could of an improved in the visual of the cinnamon panel, and that this with visual of the old wXP, an improvement so that the app abrir on the memsmo icone so with this app here https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com / Applets / view / 269, it works fine, this will give you a more modern look on the cinnamon panel, as well as ubuntu with Unity that apps open on top of their own icons. Thanks!

  25. Hello

    Could you make nemo work with kdeconnect. Cannot browse my files with nemo.

    And could you remove the double clicks from archive manager and the software manager(mintinstall). I just use single clicks and find that anoying.

    And the Softwaremanager(mintinstall) takes ages to start could you speed it up?

  26. The option “deaktivate touchpad while typing” is broken in Mint since ages, would be nice if that could be fixed.

    Maybe you can make it like in KDE Neon, that works great.

    Edit by Clem: That’s a synaptics option and it should work fine. Did you install libinput?

  27. Dear Clem,
    Maybe it is going to be too personal, but what about the different colored versions of Mint-Y theme:)
    Secondly, are there any progress about the different workspaces with different wallpapers setting?
    Making great job out there, thanks for everything.

  28. Not sure who’s jurisdiction it is, but the Mint Backup tool really needs to be fixed. I’ve been repeatedly forced to build up from scratch every time I install Linux Mint afresh. If the backup tool could be repaired, it would be deeply appreciated. No pressure, though; Mint is great. =)

    Edit by Clem: Hi Martin, it’s ours. Can you show us what’s wrong with it?

  29. Just updated to 18.1 Cinnamon. Used Software Manager to install Tor, it shows to be installed, but I can’t find it anywhere.

    Next topic: Why do all of the Linux OS’ use Google? Would a Linux-based browser be more than the developers really want to spend time creating?

  30. I don’t know how you guys can be always so positive about your own written news?
    fact is..
    so far I getting tired .. of this kind of ignorance
    with every upgrade another new feature her and there
    but as always …!
    new bugs and errors,and things out of whack
    just an example my Hp printer is now not supported anymore and don’t work ..bingo bongo gone..
    VLC has now a flickering issue when playing movies …
    etc.ect. the list never ends.
    why not get everything once to a standard level working bug free
    that would make people confident about Linux OS
    Finally I realized the tremendous waste of time I done so far studying mostly about bugs and glitches and work abouts.
    But actually not using and enjoying Linux
    or being anyhow productive.
    name the uncountable list of Distro’s and Desktop Environments
    Mint is the not the worst I have to say
    but noncommercial freedom may be just an illusion.

    Edit by Clem: Hi Lars, I’m not sure what to say. We fix a lot of bugs on a daily basis. It’s not necessarily something we post about, even when it’s relevant. If you have a look at github, you’ll see much more than just the new features I mentioned here, you’ll also see plenty of bug fixes. We don’t work on VLC though, and we certainly don’t work on HP drivers. If you pintpoint something wrong on these, do your homework find the cause and suggest a solution we can consider patching them, but that lies more on you than on us and it starts with your feedback and your troubleshooting. Without knowledge and efforts there is no freedom. Stuff works because people care and that starts with you. There is an OS out there for people who don’t, and it is indeed commercial.

  31. @larsatmint

    that’s the word ow wisdom at last.

    When you just installs LM17 or LM18 it looks like good alternative to W7 in office. But the devil hiding in details. Your excel files with macros stop working, your formulas stop working as well, your Word files with some formating ang graphics looks awful, no mouse drivers with GUI for some horizontal scrolls and buttons, everything made via that terminal. Tons of typing instead of 2 mouse clicks! Its a 21 century, yeap, everything was made without any GUI or GUI have poor usability. RDP session its a REAL pain. Why there is no any normally working client in whole Linux galaxy?? Everything was made via rdesktop or freerdp with these ancient glithcing bugzilla – no normal clipboard with formatted text and screens, resizing window in realtime, CAPSLOCK problems. In fact LM17|LM18 performance are poor campare to W7 x64 on same hardware. 99% of time are googling about why not working this or how can I fix that. But every nix-student had wrote it unique and absolutely amazing GUI for linux. Over 9000. KDE, LMDE, Kubuntu, Xubuntu,Bubuntu, Whateverbuntu. But none of it works stable and can be used in production instead of Windows platform. Users absolutely unhappy. I do my best to implement LM17/LM18 in my office. And all that Im doing is hunting in google for another bug workaround…

    Edit by Clem: Wisdom is to know what you like and to enjoy yourself. I’m enjoying my software experience but you don’t sound like you are and your users aren’t. Office documents work better in Office. Hardware with no specs and windows-only binary drivers works better with the Windows drivers than when reversed-engineered. I don’t know if I agree about the rest, but if these two key points are essential to you, then you’ve enough reasons there to stick to Windows. You either chose the wrong document formats, hardware devices or software solution and it’s not working for you. If your experience with Windows was positive then you should consider using it again. People on this blog aren’t interested in that operating system but it would be futile to try and convince each other than one operating is better for everybody than the other. This isn’t the case. There is no better Windows than Windows and no better Linux than Linux. I wouldn’t be happy at all if I had to use Windows, and you don’t look very happy to me with Linux, so by all means don’t try to promote Windows to me and I’ll respect reciprocity. As you say it is the 21st century, and with so much choice, quality and resources available to us, everybody should be able to find and enjoy what they like.

  32. Hi,

    You should use Amazon pay to make it easier to donate.

    My computer has an AMD graphic card and I am still using a previous version of Mint. I hope that AMD or someone decide that we with AMD cards should not be excluded from the wonderful world of Linux.

    Thomas

  33. Hi Clem
    when you have sometime

    it would be nice if you can test/fix the issue with playing audio over bluetooth headphones , my bose headphones dont work with mint 18.1 and its a pain to get them working

    thanks

  34. Hi Clem – A big fan and user since Daryna, I have just escaped from Obesity and hope to escape from Type2 Diabetes so am re-visiting all my limited budgets Information Technology, so a simple question, Is there a modern Mint equivalent to ‘pysdm’ ?
    (I’d like to better control StartUp drive visibility on the Desktop in MintSerenaMATE 64.)
    And do keep up talking to the folk out here, unlike Bill Gates who ‘lost it’.

  35. Clem: re: your responses in #40 and #42. very gracious. you are a role model.
    Have you considered politics? (just joking as usual)
    Peter

  36. #23 and #43 seem to have problems with AMD graphics … yet, I do believe the Mini Mintbox Pro is a AMD chipset? I have been waiting long months since it was announced and you have long promised a review. Is there a problem here?

    pi-pab

  37. I recently downloaded Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon to a DVD but it would not install. In fact it came with no desktop. I would like to know how to install this program?

  38. @pipab: there’s AMDGPU driver which supports modern video cards, but older cards, which were previously supported by fglrx driver, are left with only open source drivers, which don’t work good for everyone.

  39. Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit on HP Stream 11 notebook (laptop) computer.

    The F5 button has a mute light on a HP Stream 11 notebook. On an 1 year older version of the HP Stream 11, the mute light has recently been implemented to be on when mute (F5) button is pressed.

    Strangely, on newer HP Stream 11 notebook the mute light does not light up. Details are:
    HP Stream Notebook 11-r007TU
    * Intel Celeron Processor N2840 (2.16GHz)
    * 32GB eMMC
    * 2048MB DDR3 SDRAM
    * Windows 10 (This has been replaced with Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit)
    * 11.6″ Diagonal HD LED Display
    * WLAN & Bluetooth
    * DTS Studio Sound
    http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-Stream-11-Notebook-PC/8499339/model/8959551/product-info
    The color is blue

    Is it possible to enable the mute light to show on newer HP Stream 11 notebook computers please?

    Thank you

  40. @Monsta: any idea when the said driver for modern AMD GPU’s will be available in the Driver Manager? Perhaps in LM 18.2?

  41. You can try installing xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package directly. I never tested it though – I have no AMD hardware.

    Edit by Clem: No, that’s installed by default. AMD now provides open source drivers (xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu) but also proprietary ones (AMDGPU Pro), and it’s these which we should eventually include in the driver manager. It’s not really a question of adding support in mintdrivers though.. these drivers should be packaged upstream and support should be added in ubuntu-drivers-common. At the moment all there is some tar archive published by AMD which doesn’t understand our /etc/os-release. I didn’t answer the mintbox mini question… it does come with an AMD chipset but also with the drivers pre-installed. I’ll have to check if these are the opensource AMDGPU drivers or the pro ones. In any case the unit obviously runs well out of the box.

  42. Hi Clem

    Thanks to you and your team for your efforts to bring us a better linux mint, I really like it and I have even convinced my boss of letting me use it at work, but there’s a little problem I could not find a workaround for, I joined the machine to the active directory with realmd and sssd and I can login with a domain user from the terminal, but when I tried to do it from the mdm it displays this message: “The system administrator has disabled access to the system temporarily”.

    I have read that I can overcome this by installing the lightdm, but I don’t want to do it, is there any chance this problem will be fixed in a next release? Do you have any suggestion so I can login now with the mdm?

  43. In t in. to comment 49, I am using a stream 11 these days, bought back in Aug 2016. My F5 key is blank except for the F5. My F6 key is the mute on mine and while I see no light operating on the F6 the state displays briefly on the screen as well as the state showing on the speaker icon in the ‘system tray’ area of the panel.

    Clem, I too am impressed with the courtesy of your response on questions 40 and 42. And thanks for all the work you and your team put in. This is the only distribution LM18.1 Cinnamon) that I have tried from the debian/ubuntu stream, mageia, opensuse, manjaro that I have tried in the last 6 months where my hp envy 4520 wireless not only printed, but scanned wirelessly. Others would print but they all needed a cable to scan.

  44. Hardware : Apple MacBook 3,1 (circa 2008)

    The dual-boot install of Serena 18.1 KDE went smoothly as far as Linux is concerned.

    Sadly, it somehow kills Audio/Sound for OSX.

    This also happened when I tried your 17.3 last year.

    I’ve tried numerous googled-suggestions for the ”No output devices found” issue. That includes deleting various ”.plist” files, repeatedly killing/restarting the ”coreaudiod” daemon, even ”AppleHDA” kext unload (which errored) and load, all with liberal reboots.

    Despite all that, the AUDIO under OSX is STILL BROKEN.

    I don’t want to do the final step of zapping the PRAM, because last year when I tried 17.3 and it similarly broke my OSX audio and I zapped the PRAM, it totally borked the whole linux/grub startup, requiring a usb-booted grub-terminal commandline to specify the ”linux (hd0,gpt6)/vmlinuz-blahblah root=/dev/sda7” and ”initrd (hd0,gpt6)/blahblah” and that’s not acceptable or sustainable as a solution.

    Anyway, I thought you’d want to know :

    Serena 18.1 KDE installed dual-boot on a MacBook KILLS ALL MAC OS X SOUND.

    :/

    Thanks for your efforts anyway.

  45. Hello Clem. Nice work with the new releases! I know I am kind of late to this party, but when is Mint 18.2 going to be released?

  46. Further to the issue with broken OSX Audio, I’ve just discovered it also messes with the ARRANGEMENT OF DISPLAYS.

    The large external monitor permanently connected to the mini-displayport sits on the desk behind a usb-keyboard and the laptop itself sits on a shelf up above.

    We set the Displays Arrangement in both Linux Mint 18.1 Serena KDE System-Settings and in OSX System-Preferences to have the two screens arranged one above the other.

    But booting between Mac and Linux Mint CHANGES THE ARRANGEMENT BACK TO THE DEFAULT SIDE-BY-SIDE.

    So that’s both Sound and Displays are borked for this OSX/Linux dual-boot MacBook.

    Does Linux Mint alter NVRAM settings in a way which conflicts?

    :/

    Edit by Clem: I can’t say categorically because I’m not involved in the development of KDE itself… but I find it very unlikely all the same. In Cinnamon/MATE/GNOME these typically only affect the local settings and pulseaudio and randr, nothing changes in the hardware itself and there’s no common configuration with other OS. I would assume it’s the same with KDE, I’d be surprised if it went further than that and set any kind of persistent state on the hardware itself.

  47. Hello Clem!

    according to my last commend in this section
    just spend some time yet again
    and reinstalled mint previous version 18.0 xfce
    I had to ditch the Cinnamon Edition’s since 17.2 because nothing was
    working anymore with every new upgrade another downfall
    so anyway..
    everything I mentioned working fine now
    HP printing working again flawless out the box, VLC flickering bug gone…
    Well guys I am using Mint now for some years now and like it as long
    everything is pretty stable and working
    even donated
    but with upgrades I am getting careful from now on
    will stay with mint
    since W10 is profiling everyone
    it is actually a great chance for Linux
    just don’t mess it up please

    Lars

  48. Vertical panels released too soon I think. They do not look nice and for their shake, cinnamon lost those box pointers. Now cinnamon panels look like any other DE panel.
    Don’t get my wrong, Linux Mint is the best and we all appreciate all the work that is being done.

    Edit by Clem: Oh no, the removal of box pointers isn’t related to vertical panels. We wanted the box pointers gone, both for aesthetic reasons (and I agree, it’s subjective, so I understand some people regret them) and design reasons (they were buggy and complicated Cinnamon’s code and design significantly).

  49. hi Clem,

    Great Work you did for LinuxMint. I enjoy LinuxMint-Mate. But what I am missing, is a wheather-Indicator for the Mate-Panel. But what I also like is, that the panels can now be placed to the side of the screen and not only on the top or the bottom of the screen. Nice.

    And for the future, LinuxMint should switch over to PaleMoon instead fo Firefox. PaleMoon is opensource and independent and also pdf-viewing is now possible since the new updated Version 27.1. So who needs Firefox??

    And what I really like is Rhythmbox for Music. This was great choice to switch back to an opensource-player. Thanks for that.

    And the new Wallpapers…Just great. I will keep some of them for the future.

    Edit by Clem: Thanks. Just some clarification.. vertical panels were there before in MATE, and both MATE and Cinnamon have weather applets (for MATE it’s in the repositories, for Cinnamon it’s in Settings -> Applets -> More online). Banshee was open-source but it’s nice to have Rhythmbox, we just needed to add systray support to it and we switched to it.

  50. hello,

    i got a bluedio t2+ headset from china.
    on a dual-boot with win 7 it works without major problems and clear audio quality.
    trying it with linux mint 18.1 connected rapidly, but gives me like a “mono” sound to me, so the audio quality is missing.
    as a bluetooth adapter im using taotronics tt-ba03 with bt 4.0 via usb.

    do you have an idea what i could try to improve the audio quality?

    best regards from vienna

    Edit by Clem: If you can’t do it from the sound settings, try to switch the BT device profile to A2DP with pavucontrol.

  51. Hi Clem,

    I saw your entry for Linux Mint 18.2 [Planned] (“track/troubleshoot shutdown sequence (user should know what is happening when shutdown isn’t immediate)”).
    Are you aware how to reproduce a long reboot/shutdown lag (is it the same?)? If not:

    1. Connect to a server per WLAN and mount a few folders with NFS4.
    I did it per fstab and tried a lot of parameters te get a quick shutdown without success.

    2a. Simply shut down LM 18.x. I think it depends on the hardware, if WLAN is disconnected first or after the unmounts; may be this works (not for me).
    2b. Turn off WLAN -> mounts still exist -> problems with Nemo (click through different directories) -> LM 18.x shutdown takes ages.
    2c. Turn off the server -> same problems like 2b.

    Thanks for looking into this.

    Edit by Clem: The shutdown sequence hangs when a service isn’t finished running. There are many different possible causes for that, but the first step is to give ourselves the ability to properly troubleshoot. i.e. to be able to understand what’s happening, what service stopped the shutdown sequence and to show that to the user. There are two sequences at play also… the end of the session (i.e. your desktop session) and then the shutdown sequence itself (i.e after the session manager stopped and between that moment and the effective power shutdown). We can look at particular use cases in isolation, samba, nfs..etc.. but what I’m really interested in for this development cycle is for us to get more clarity, more information. Also, please note that this is a whishlist item in the roadmap and no design started on this yet, so although we’d really like to implement this, we don’t yet know how we’ll do it, if it will land in 18.2 and how good it will be. I will of course talk about it if/when we manage to implement it though 🙂

  52. Hope you guys fix Samba on Linux Mint 18.2 so it works out of box again. 🙂

    Edit by Clem: Sorry Allen, that’s out of the scope for us. We removed it from the default installation because it made the boot sequence lag and it wasn’t working properly out of the box. Hopefully we can consider adding Samba again if it gets better upstream in the future, but that’s not something we’re involved with directly.

  53. [ SOLVING THE DUAL-BOOT MACBOOK PART 1 of 5 – split to overcome post-length issues ]

    🙂

    Thank you Clem for your reply. Your NVRAM comment spurred me to troubleshoot rigorously.

    Pressing the MacBook’s [Alt] key (aka [Option] key) while powering-on does still bring up the usual Apple graphical-boot-menu, and this shows one single grey disk-icon for the lone OSX Snow Leopard installation on one partition of the MacBook’s internal drive. Nothing for Linux, no icons with penguins, as per earlier PPC-Mac dual-boots, but it must be remembered this is an Intel Mac with EFI architecture.

    Still, so far so good, the good ol’ [Alt]-powerup Apple GUI boot selector is still available.

    Okay, I launched the (lone) OSX from the icon, and it booted-up normally to a Mac with WORKING SOUND.

    Process of deduction made me suspect the GRUB bootloader…

  54. [ SOLVING THE DUAL-BOOT MACBOOK PART 2 of 5 ]

    After rebooting into Linux-Mint I looked inside ”grub.cfg” (located at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg) and I was shocked to see so much code for the OSX menu-entry, lots of ”if then” code, and directly affecting the loading of kernel extensions (which would obviously include both Sound and Displays). I don’t know for sure, but after googling/reading widely I suspect those huge blocks of auto-generated grub.cfg code for launching xnu/darwin/osx are motivated by supporting Hackintoshes.

    It seems that a simpler grub chainloader strategy ( see bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=893179#c27 ) pointing to the appropriate native Mac boot files is quite enough for a real-Mac dual-boot. It does not need all the suspicious if-then/kext-control tentacles as presently written into the grub.cfg by the Linux-Mint installer.

    After reading how sometimes the low-level disk-order can change, I had wanted to maintain the robustness of UUIDs. But unexpectedly I ended up down a poorly-documented rabbit-hole chasing grub minutiae.

  55. [ SOLVING THE DUAL-BOOT MACBOOK PART 3 of 5 ]

    Unfortunately, buggily and confusingly, the UUID from commandline ”blkid” output is NOT WHAT GRUB SEEMS TO USE IN THE CASE OF HFSPLUS partitions!!!

    It was necessary to use ”grub-probe” to get their fs_uuid for the Mac partition. I do not know where or why it gets a different 16-character UUID rather than the usual longer 32-character UUID from blkid. So, as a cop-out, just for now, I decided to use the ”–label” option instead.

    I edited the ”/etc/grub.d/40_custom” file to add a menu-entry which is a chainloader to the MacBook’s installed OSX partition. Addition shown below. The commented-out lines represent possible alternatives (except for the first one with the 32-long UUID which totally fails).

  56. [ SOLVING THE DUAL-BOOT MACBOOK PART 4 of 5 ]

    [code]
    menuentry “MacOS X ChainLoader : Snow-Leopard on internal-HD partition-2″ –class osx –class darwin –class os {
    insmod part_gpt
    insmod fat
    insmod hfsplus
    insmod search_fs_uuid
    insmod chain
    set root=’hd0,gpt2′
    # search –no-floppy –set=root –fs-uuid 5038bdec-38da-10ce-fedb-cfb8ba765420 ### FAILS ###
    # search –no-floppy –set=root –fs-uuid 370f0330681fec5d
    # search –no-floppy –set=root –hint-efi=hd0,gpt2 –hint-bios=hd0,gpt2 –hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt2 –file /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
    search –no-floppy –set=root –hint-efi=hd0,gpt2 –hint-bios=hd0,gpt2 –hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt2 –label ‘MacBook_HD’
    chainloader ($root)/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
    }
    [/code]

    Then after the usual obligatory ”update-grub” (aka grub-mkconfig) step I rebooted and selected this new entry. The result was a successful launch of MacOS X and the previous sound/audio issue was gone.

  57. [ SOLVING THE DUAL-BOOT MACBOOK PART 5 of 5 ]

    I hope all my wasted hours help others avoid such a fate. Perhaps all this Mac-stuff could be moved out to a Wiki?

    We all know that more and more people are looking for secure modern alternatives on perfectly-good hardware which Apple long-ago obsoleted with a contemptuous corporate-policy flip of the digit.

    Extensive googling shows that there are longstanding un-fixed issues around the Grub developers’ Mac/EFI strategy.

    THEREFORE, PLEASE CLEM, AND PLEASE MINT-TEAM, WOULD YOU CONSIDER MODIFYING THE LINUX-MINT INSTALLER SOMEHOW (in particular, grub’s ”os-prober” and ”grub-probe” automatic stuff???) TO ACCOMMODATE THIS COMMON DUAL-BOOT SITUATION, ELIMINATING THESE BUGGY-GRUB ISSUES.

    Again, thanks for all your hard work on Mint, it is appreciated.

    🙂

  58. Oh, and I forgot, just another little bit of feedback :

    The sddm Login-Screen sits OFFSET to the right-of-centre on the laptop’s built-in-screen, while simultaneously underneath on the external monitor it appears where it should be, symmetrically slap-bang in the middle.

    :/

  59. Clem, thanks for all these.

    Is there any plan of improving the default cinnamon calendar applet? I would really appreciate if it can connect to some PIM (like Thunderbird) so that the month calendar view highlights and lists the events.

    Thanks!

  60. Hi Clem,

    “Don’t feed the troll”

    Please try to ignore the trolls who have now made it onto your comments section. It was only a matter of time until you got hit with irrational fan-boys who try to rubbish your FREE and SUPERB offering.
    There will be no reasoning with them and there will be no point in citing the fact that your offering is the most popular linux download and respected for its stability and performance. No one is forcing them to use Linux of any type or to leave Windows.

  61. I found that i can’t drag and drop desktop icons in quick launch in cinnamon desktop taskbar. Hoping next release of cinnamon desktop will have this functionality. 🙂

  62. Yes, I see a lot of people complaining about Bluetooth, really, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fix this problem, I can send files from my computer to my smartphone, but I can not send files from my smartphone to my computer; really this bug irritates a lot, I believe it is the most important problem of Linux mint.

  63. Complementing the above comment, this problem occurs in the Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce environment; In the KDE environment Bluetooth works perfectly …

  64. Updating: I deleted blueberry and installed Blueman, and now I can upload files from my smartphone to my computer and from my computer to my smartphone. The earphone via Bluetooth still does not work, but for me the most important thing was to send files from the smartphone to the computer. Many thanks 25@tompabes by the tip!
    Using Cinnamon 18.1

  65. Hi! Marvelous team! I was using Betsy LMDE2 beta mate since 3 weeks ago, everyday and more than 8 hours a day, and. it’s so fine, noone bug at all. This sure is the best distribution I was used in my 20 years working with linux! it’s super rapid in low recurses pcs. so.. I am anxoiuos for your stable releases. Thank you very much and a lot of congratulatios for the best linux of the planet!

  66. LMDE2 is for me:
    1.- All the solid power and speed of debian
    2.- All the facilities of Mint without problems of drivers and codecs.
    3.- And now a plus: a new installer esier than Ubiquity.
    Definitively:
    The best Linux of the planet that now can be used for anyone,

  67. Hi Clem, I would like to commend you and your team for such a great distro Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.1. I have been using Linux Mint since December 2015 after leaving Windows 10 because of confidential issues. As a simple user of a PC and not someone who use command line although I have used it twice. I found it was so easy to convert from Windows to Linux Mint and as a home user who knows nothing about command line nor really does not want to know command line, it is superb and everything a home user would want from Operating System.

  68. Thank you Clem and the development team. A friend suggested Mint as a superior OS to several other flavors that I’d played around with in the past. I had an old malware infested Vista box lying around so I wiped it and and did a clean install of Mint to give it a try a couple months ago. It’s got a renewed lease on life with a clean, intuitive environment thanks to your efforts. It is simply the best general purpose OS available today. Although I have several other computers available that are all significantly higher powered and run Win 10, Win 7 and other flavors of Linux, they have now been relegated to single task machines. I’m a bit underemployed right now but I will be making a donation to help continue your work as soon as I can. Thanks again!

  69. Hello Linux men and woman. I love the 18.2 sarah but the one update has blown away my desktop, screensaver, and despite reset of the settings nada!. Please help me. Thanks fer the good programs.

  70. Dear Linux Mint Team, Clem,

    I’m really looking forward to see the improvements in LM 18.2 🙂 Especially as I’m a fan of BT OBEX file transfer as it is really easy.
    Also the improvement of the spices (a lot of them didn’t work anymore with 18.x) are really very welcome.

    I don’t want to forget to thank you for this wonderful distro LM 18.1 Cinnamon which freed me from MS pain now years ago.

    Cheers, Henrik

  71. Switched from an old but trusty Lenovo X200 laptop recently to a T440s (there are some useful things on Mint on this Thinkpad here: https://thinkpadmint.blogspot.com).

    The only disimprovement since I added a Thinkpad Ultra Dock is that my monitor, an HP ZR24w, is sometimes wrongly detected as a lower resolution “Synapse” monitor, which means nothing to me. It happens when using a VGA connection (preferred as I use a 2 port KVM w/VGA to switch between Windows and Linux machines) but not with a Displayport link.

    I’m using the ARandR app as a workaround, loading a saved docked and working configuration. I think it resolves ok (has today). Would be good if it wasn’t needed, if that’s possible.

    Apart from this minor issue I’m very happy. Thanks to the Mint team.

    Paul O
    [regular contributor]

  72. Could “Rocket.Chat” be included in the default Linux Mint Cinnamon distro?
    The Ultimate Open Source Web Chat Platform
    Multi-platform – Access from anywhere: web browser, desktop and mobile applications.
    Highly Configurable – Set up your system exactly how you want it. Rebrand as needed.
    Open Source – Our code is 100% Open Source under the MIT license. Fork it on GitHub.
    Features: LiveChat, Video Conferencing, File Sharing, Tex Math Rendering, Screen Sharing.
    https://rocket.chat/
    https://rocket.chat/download
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket.Chat

    Perhaps it could be included in the Linux Mint setup alongside Skype?

    Thank you

  73. Why is Hardinfo – System Profiler and Benchmark not part of default installation?
    Hope you make it part of default installation in Linux Mint 18.2 🙂

    Also i found that GParted only shows up in live mode, it doesn’t show up after Linux Mint 18.1 is installed in Hard Drive.
    GParted should be part of default installation. I shouldn’t require to manually install GParted from Software Manager.

  74. Hi,

    @Clem: You said : “The new stable ISOs for LMDE 2 “Betsy” should be released this week.”. We are on February 26, 2017 and there are no new isos yet. 🙁 Is there a delay ?

    Do you think that LMDE2 can be used with easy2boot program ?

    Thanks.

  75. I’ve had a lot of trouble installing mint18 KDE I got there in the end. But now it keep freezing all the time no matter what I do, Reinstalling it dose not make any differnts It keep freezing. It’s on a dell optiplex 380 with 8GB ram.

  76. I’m an older person that wants to get away from windows. The problem I have and why I can’t fully get away from windows is NETFLIX. I would dump windows if Mint would just find a way to get Netflix working natively. This and games that use DirectX 11. Until then, Linux is just a pipedream. Come on guys, we need Netflix to work at the very least. You may say “we don’t have anything to do with that”. But that can’t be. Firefox pulled support for netflix, google chrome is no longer supporting it either. Why ? Because its on linux. I don’t get it and I don’t understand it, but doing a lot of web searching has shown that since netflix and DX11 games are still not working under linux, Linux just won’t be nothing more then a pipedream for us home users.

  77. The X-apps are a great alternative to the “Gnome3 continued malfunction of UI” that is currently going on at the moment in Linuxland.
    I’m finding that after many years of Mint being almost too stable to knock over, 18.1 can be tripped up quite easily and also i/o issues are glaring on my new Gigabyte i7 laptop.
    I/O: copying of (many) files seems to be very delayed and intermittent. An optional bandwidth graph like Win8/Win10 have on copy/move would be nice to see. Also if you have 2 documents open in Libre Writer and ^c ^v a bunch of stuff into one, you cannot switch to the other and carry on typing. Everything freezes until the paste is completed. Could be a Libre Office issue.
    Tripping: leave a session to screen-lock, then tried to shut down (instead of password back in) .. needed to use the on/off button of mercy as it would not go anywhere – shutdown or allow login again.
    Hopefully some of these issues are addressed with 18.2. So by the way what will 18.2 be called?

  78. Hello Clem,
    the website was down yesterday.
    Another hacker attac? Do I have to worry downloading a (compromised???) image?
    Thanx (as always) for your great work.
    Joseph

    Edit by Clem: Hi Joseph, we had a few hours of downtime due to a technical issue with one of the servers.

  79. This Linux Mint is fantastic. Also adds character to my dell latitude laptop with i5 and light up keyboard. I would like to financially contribute. But i do not use Pay Pal, Bit Coin, or any other, and i do not have a Credit Card nor will i ever use one. Is there a place i can send a check?

  80. Hi, I wanted to thank all who contribute to Mint. It is awesome. But I would like to request a change in XPlayer. I use it on my Notebook often, and I like the feature to jump in the Video with the Arrow-Keys, but it would be great to control, how big the Jump is. Now in 18.1 the Jump forward is 1 Minute, and the reversejump is 10 Seconds. To get over some nasty Intros or Outros, the 1 Minute Jump is to big, so I would like be able to change that.

  81. Allen

    Comment 88: Linux Mint comes with a disk management utility already, including partitioning tools. Simply type disks in the menu search box, and it will come up. If you don’t like that, fine. Go get Gparted. I personally prefer Gparted only because I am more familiar with it. But again, Mint comes with a full disk management tool out of the box. They are not obligated in any way to bundle Gparted. Further, please remember that the Mint team has to make critical decisions about the size of the .iso on a regular basis. They can’t just add something because we say so, although the do consider it. Each byte rolled into an .iso represents an exponential drain on Mint server resources when so many people are pulling at the same thing all over the world – hence, the need to make these decisions very carefully. I promise, it is nothing personal against you or me. They are simply at an intersection and have to turn left or right, not both. Unfortunately, you and I sometimes don’t get our every wish and demand. All that said, they do a phenomenal job of managing what goes into their .iso.

    Allen and BismarX

    Comments 90 and 92: Am I missing something, or doesn’t the driver manager that comes with Mint not address the installation of proprietary graphics drivers?

  82. Hey Clem,

    I have upgraded to Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.1 from 18.0. Before upgrading I would connect my Iphone 5s (running IOS 10.2.1) and I could get into my Iphone files to copy pictures from my Iphone to my computer. Now, my Iphone mounts (sometimes) and doesn’t show any files. I suspect the culprit is libimobiledevice6. Any suggestions?

  83. What happened to LMDE 2 new ISO? just checked and no mention of it on the community site in ISO image testing? I thought it was supposed to be out last week.

  84. Linux Mint doesn’t come with Vulkan installed by default. I think Vulkan should installed by default during Linux Mint installation if Nvidia and ATI drivers don’t automatically install Vulkan like on Windows. Having Vulkan part of default installation will make Linux Mint ready for Vulkan gaming out of box. 🙂

  85. @PB: GParted is already on Linux Mint iso as GParted shows up in menu in live mode, it just doesn’t install on to hard drive by default.

    You can install Nvidia and Ati drivers from Driver Manager just fine. Having Nvidia and ATI installer will be more beginner friendly for newcomers. 🙂

  86. I was paciently waiting for LMDE 2 20017 stable released, it was anounced here since february 18th. I was working with your beta and itś really fantastic, for longer than a month every day and I’m not detected any bug. So I AM VERy convinced you’ll rekease a very nice release, a iso that’well be a classic icon in the free sofware.
    I wish only a few message by Clem, for this release. Thanks a lot.

  87. @PB: It is impossible to install proprietary AMD driver from Driver Manager for Mint 18.x at this moment. I believe it is possible for Nvidia though. Not 100% sure as I do not use Nvidia GPU any more.
    What allen suggested is not a must, but perhaps there is some benefit in managing GPU drivers separately from the rest of hardware?
    Just a thought.

  88. I am using a T460 with two batteries inside, yet I can only change the name of one of them – not a big issue, just wanting to let you know. Also on that matter, there is only one in the taskbar being shown, and the percentage is only displayed while charging.

    Enjoying Mint a lot these days! Thank you once again!

  89. I can’t Make Link to Desktop in Cinnamon, must drag and drop created shortcut to desktop.
    Make Link to Desktop function in Context Menu would be nice.
    Also created shortcut doesn’t show the icon of the app.

  90. Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit, USB Stick Formatter
    Once a USB stick has been formatted:
    1. Please device to ‘System Tray’
    2. Please add button next to device in Nemo to eject.

    Interesting, when the device is clicked on in Nemo, both the eject button show in Nemo and the device shows in the ‘System Tray’.

    Thank you

  91. Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit, USB Stick Formatter
    Once a USB stick has been formatted:
    1. Please add USB device to ‘System Tray’
    2. Please add eject button next to the USB device in Nemo.

    Interesting, when the USB device is clicked on in Nemo, both the eject button show in Nemo and the USB device shows in the ‘System Tray’.

    Thank you

  92. This relates to the “USB Stick Formatter” program in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit.

    Please add the notifications the contents of the dialog box which shows when a format is complete, such as “The USB stick was formatted successfully.” to the notifications. If there is a message when the format was not successful, please also add that to the notifications.

    It would complement the notifications of Thunderbird new email, FileZilla file transfers, safe to remove USB stick, network connection/disconnection, etc.

    Thank you

  93. Clem- I just want to say thank-you for what you’ve done. I left XP after Microsoft pulled support for it and then started right into Mint 16. I’ve since progressed to 17 then to 18.1 Cinnamon. Even though I am a true novice, it’s become very apparent to me how much more “polished” Mint has become. I have finally decided it’s time to give back a little with a donation to the Mint Team. Thank-you so much!

  94. While all this news is wonderful, I have one request, Can someone go kick AMD and Linus Torvalds in the A$$$ and get them to get HDMI audio working for the rx480?!?!? this has been an ongoing issue since Kernel 4.4 and a lot of us are really getting sick of waiting. I’ve stopped using linux until this is resolved as I don’t think it fair the I have to change my hardware just to get sound working on ANY linux distro.

    And before anyone says anything about AMDGPU-PRO, it doesn’t work either, for audio anyway. The latest version of that driver actually causes Cinnamon to crash as well. So until these issues are resolved I’m done with linux. I just don’t have time for B.S. anymore.

  95. @Clem, I just discovered that the latest version of xreader FIXED a long standing bug in evince / atril, namely that fillable fields in *some* PDF forms are NOT displayed or printed properly; the fields appear black and must be clicked to show contents. See this critical tax form for example: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2016/16_540.pdf
    Other forms from my state look just fine, go figure.

    At any rate THANK YOU to the team, hopefully whatever fixed it won’t undergo a regression. Meanwhile I have to convince the state bureaucrats that they have a problem. 🙁

  96. Clem:

    Please implement something to have a big calendar (small numbers in cal are hard to read)

    fer

  97. I would suggest a modification on xplayer if May I, is to be in the options. That is to be able to choose the default subtitle language to be downloaded automatically if found .. I hope this is easy to be done
    thanks

    the linuxmint is the best linux dist. I have ever tried .. and now it is my main OS and tries the others and delete them but never deleted mint

  98. The new bluetooth interface is gorgeous, what would be cool is if we had a priorities menu- specially for those of us who have more than 1 audio bluetooth device for example (if x is connected, ignore y etc.)

  99. @allen #107

    I have found that “Screenshot” (installed by default in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon) is better than the “Snipping Tool” in Windows.

  100. What Linux Mint 18.1 needs, is when I many applications open, I have dual screens, for the task bar to group similar things together. I will have 2 Firefox, 3 open office word documents, maybe a game going on either Kdenlive or Kino also running and I have my task-bar overflowing with stuff. Make is so we can set it clear this up by grouping things together

  101. Please implement fernando #126 suggestion for Calendar in Panel: “Please implement something to have a big calendar (small numbers in cal are hard to read)” Thank you

  102. @plaidon “Looking for the new LMDE 2 stable ISO (2.17) Why the delay?”

    Hopefully, they have decided to get lmde2 further into the present. I have a Toshiba laptop that runs LM 17.2, LM 18 and Debian Jessie 8.7.1 but I am totally unable to install lmde2 or the new lmde2 beta on it.

  103. Some times a day, Every day I’m looking for the promised LMDE 2 stable 2017 Cinnamon and Mate releases. Two month ago I’m working with the beta, many hours dayly and I’m very exited and happy. These beta LMDE 2 are fantastic.
    Now the new installer is Calamares (or similar) so there is no complications with the original Debian installer more powerful but more dificult to manage. Now any new Linux user may install and use LMDE2. with all ts speed, solidness and security. Its really a very nice OS.
    PLEASE….CLEM…. a few words. about the status of these releases.
    THANKS A LOT.

  104. sudo apt-get install build-essential
    sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib
    sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libxrandr-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libxinerama-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libmpg123-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install liblcms2-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libosmesa6-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libsane-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install libcapi20-dev:i386
    sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev:i3
    86

    sudo apt-get install libghc-pcap-dev:i386
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
    requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
    distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
    or been moved out of Incoming.
    The following information may help to resolve the situation:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    libghc-pcap-dev:i386 : Depends: libghc-base-dev-4.8.2.0-a3ce8:i386
    Depends: libghc-bytestring-dev-0.10.6.0-89a6f:i386
    Depends: libghc-network-dev-2.6.2.1-bb6bd:i386
    Depends: libghc-time-dev-1.5.0.1-f2449:i386
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

    sudo apt-get install libgphoto2-dev:i386

    sudo apt-get install libldap-ocaml-dev:i38
    6
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
    requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
    distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
    or been moved out of Incoming.
    The following information may help to resolve the situation:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    libldap-ocaml-dev:i386 : Depends: libocamlnet-ocaml-dev-s40q6:i386
    Depends: libpcre-ocaml-dev-43mh0:i386
    Depends: libssl-ocaml-dev-d7j01:i386
    Depends: ocaml-nox-4.02.3:i386
    Depends: libocamlnet-ocaml-dev:i386 (>= 2.2.8.1-1)
    but it is not going to be installed
    Depends: libssl-ocaml-dev:i386 (>= 0.4.2-3) but it
    is not going to be installed
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

    COULD YOU INCLUDE EVEN SOME OF THESE WINE-DEVEL DEPENCIES ON LINUX MINT? Its really time consuming and hard to figure out what wine needs. And these arent even all it wants. Default wine even with these builds with no audio at all.

  105. I got really odd issue with mint 18.1 kde. Grub menu doesnt show on boot, screen is corrupted. Adding nomodeset leads into non working system. That’s hard to fix. Then upgrading also kernel seems to fail. The latest 4.4.66-87 (or something like that) hangs on boot. The latest 4.8 series hangs on login screen…

    Really odd.

  106. Another fresh install. Mint 18.1. After choosing to upgrade all packages (the option from bottom). Mint upgrades kernel 4.4.–66 or something and it hangs on desktop. Cant use mouse or keyboard. The default 53 version works just fine. And grub screen is so corrupted that I cant change kernel from there either.

    Also I dint have thiskind of kernel issues before when I had 18.1 installed mate version and then swapped into kde, installing kde desktop.

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