We’ve got a lot of news to cover this month.
First things first. I’d like to take a moment to thank all the generous people who fund our project. Many thanks for your donations.
Blog
The Linux Mint blog was given a new look and now supports HTTPS and nested comments.
Until now development and technical news were posted on a separate blog called Segfault.These news will now be posted here instead and Segfault will be discontinued.
KDE Edition
In continuation with what’s been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so.
I would like to thank Kubuntu for the amazing work they have done. The quality of Plasma 5 in Xenial made backports a necessity. The rapid pace of development upstream from the KDE project made this very challenging, yet they managed to provide a stable flow of updates for us and we were able to ship good KDE editions thanks to that. I don’t think this would have been possible without them.
KDE is a fantastic environment but it’s also a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Their apps, their ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what we’re working on.
We’re not just shipping releases and distributing upstream software. We’re a product distribution and we see ourselves as a complete desktop operating system. We like to integrate solutions, develop what’s missing, adapt what’s not fitting perfectly, and we do a great deal of that not only around our own Cinnamon desktop environment but also thanks to cross-DE frameworks we put in place to support similar environments, such as MATE and Xfce.
When we work on tools like Xed, Blueberry, Mintlocale, the Slick Greeter, we’re developing features which benefit these 3 desktops, but unfortunately not KDE.
Users of the KDE edition represent a portion of our user base. I know from their feedback that they really enjoy it. They will be able to install KDE on top of Linux Mint 19 of course and I’m sure the Kubuntu PPA will continue to be available. They will be able to port Mint software to Kubuntu itself also, or they might want to trade a bit of stability away and move to to a bleeding edge distribution such as Arch to follow upstream KDE more closely.
Our own mission isn’t to diversify as much as possible in an effort to attract a bigger chunk of the Linux market, and it’s with a bit of sadness that we’re letting this edition go. We focus on things we do well and we love doing to get better and better at doing them. KDE is amazing but it’s not what we want to focus on.
With Linux Mint 18.3, we’ll release one more KDE edition. I wanted this announcement to come before the release. 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.
LMDE 3
It is important for Linux Mint to continue to support LMDE as a fallback option in case Ubuntu ever disappeared and as a development target for the many projects and technologies we work on to guarantee compatibility outside of Linux Mint. It’s a lot of work to support two separate distributions of course (I can’t think of any other project doing that in fact) and LMDE which started as an experiment has obviously a much smaller audience than Linux Mint itself. For these reasons, LMDE is usually very important but not very urgent.
A lot of people asked about LMDE 3 and we now have some information about it.
First, it will be, as predicted, based on Debian Stretch and the codename for LMDE 3 will be “Cindy”.
We’re planning to release LMDE 3 in the first quarter of 2018 and it will ship as a single edition with Cinnamon 3.8.
T-Shirts
HELLOTUX extended its range of Linux Mint products and now features polos and t-shirts with a stylized logo.
The new embroidery design
The embroidery design is being modified at the moment to make the logo uniform and in a single color.
Flatpak
You might have heard of Flatpak, AppImage or Snap.. three solutions to a common problem.
Before I show you what we did, let me explain the problem very briefly.
Installing bleeding-edge applications in Linux Mint
Linux Mint is an operating system built on a package base which doesn’t change and which is supported for 5 years. That base is Ubuntu LTS, a snapshot in time of thousands of packages maintained by Debian, and a commitment to apply security updates. The result is both very stable and very safe. You get all your software from that base, other than security patches, that software doesn’t change and so it doesn’t break. Everything is great, but there’s a trade-off. You don’t have access to new versions of software applications, you can only run the versions which are in that base.. and sometimes these versions can be 1, 2 or even 5 years older than what’s available elsewhere.
Sometimes you can just go on-line and grab the newest .DEB. For instance you can download Virtualbox 5.2.0 directly from virtualbox.org.
Sometimes it’s more complicated. New versions of the software you want to run might come with new dependencies and depend on packages which are not present in Linux Mint. When that happens, installing the newest .DEB won’t work. To solve that issue, we use PPA (Personal Package Archives), which basically are 3rd party repositories. These repositories contain both the software you want to run, and the dependencies they need to run on your package base (in Linux Mint 18.x, that package base is Ubuntu Xenial 16.04, that’s why you see PPAs marked as supporting “xenial”).
And then sometimes it’s even more complicated than that, because the dependencies the new software needs not only aren’t present in Linux Mint, but they’re not compatible with it or they would conflict with it and break other things. For instance if a new version of the software you want to install depends on GTK 3.20, you cannot install it via a PPA. GTK 3.20 cannot be installed alongside GTK 3.18 and upgrading GTK would basically break a lot of things already installed in your operating system.
To solve that last case the idea is to run the software in isolation.. in its own little environment, separate from the rest of the operating system. It’s a bit similar to what’s done in Windows, when you download apps which aren’t just 5 or 10MB but a whole 500MB or so. They contain their own dependencies and it doesn’t really matter what’s installed on your system (Note to advanced users: I’m vulgarizing a bit here.. I’m aware dependencies work much better than that, especially in Flatpak and that they’re not just stuck in the bundle blindly like it’s done when shipping a static build.. I’m just trying to explain it in simple words without getting too technical.).
So the idea is for the software you install to use its own version of GTK and its own dependencies. Linux Mint continues to use GTK 3.18 and to work very well, and that new software you install uses GTK 3.20 without impacting the rest of the OS.
That idea is to allow you to install new versions of software which aren’t available in Linux Mint, without worrying about dependencies or incompatibilities. And that idea, along with other benefits (in particular in terms of security/isolation) has been implemented by a few projects lately. On the gaming side of things, it’s worth mentioning Steam. On the software side of things you probably heard of AppImage and XDG-APP, and more recently of Flatpak (the former XDG-APP) and Snap.
Why Flatpak
The design of one of these solutions looked very promising to us and its implementation is already very stable. We’re hoping to see it gain more momentum and we’re adding full support for it in Linux Mint 18.3. This solution is Flatpak.
Similar to APT and its deb repositories, Flatpak is a manager which can be configured to point at multiple “remotes”. These remotes host software applications and dependencies (sdks, runtimes.. I don’t want to get into the technical jargon in the scope of this post). When you install a flatpak it runs in its own environment and without impacting your OS. Yet, dependencies can be common across multiple flatpak applications.
Flatpak makes it trivial to install bleeding-edge applications on our frozen LTS base. But it also makes it trivial for upstream software editors to distribute their software to Linux users, without having to care about a multitude of distributions and the many bases we have to support (typically in Linux Mint we’re currently supporting both Mint 18.x and Mint 17.x, and software needs different dependencies and different builds for each base).
Flatpak is also flexible and doesn’t rely on a middle-man between the editor and the users. Editors and users can choose to rely on centralized app stores if they wish.. but they don’t have to. For instance, an editor could ask Flathub to publish its application but it could also publish it directly, or even create its own store (i.e. “remote”). And downstream users could very well set up their Flatpak client to point to either Flathub or the Editor’s store directly, or both of them even. That flexibility is key and it contrasts with Snap which wasn’t designed with multiple repositories in mind.
How Flatpaks are integrated in Linux Mint 18.3
Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with Flatpak installed and configured by default to point to two Flatpak repositories, called “remotes”: Flathub and gnome-apps.
A new section was added to the Software Manager for Flatpaks.
The Software lists the content of each Flatpak remote (here: Flathub and Gnome Apps).
Although Flathub and Gnome-apps are configured by default, you can modify the list of remotes. If you add new ones, they will appear in the Software Manager.
Packages and flatpaks are completely different things, but in the Software Manager, they’re presented the same way: They’re just applications you install.
Flatpaks look like other apps in the Software Manager
You can browse each remote, see their flatpaks, review them, look at their screenshots, press the Install button and launch them just the same way you install other apps in the Software Manager.
Once installed Flatpaks can run in their own environment. Below is GNOME Games 3.26 running on its own GTK 3.26 inside of Linux Mint.
GNOME Games 3.26 running in its own Flatpak environment
Compared to packages there are a few subtle differences:
- Flatpak apps use the Adwaita GTK theme (they’ll use Mint-X/Mint-Y eventually, but that wont’ be ready in 18.3)
- Flatpak apps are updated automatically when you log in
- Flatpak apps do not appear in “Installed applications” and are not reinstalled by the Backup Tool when restoring a package selection.
Cinnamon 3.6
The latest version of Cinnamon was released yesterday.
We’ve described most of its new features already.. but we’ve been developing a few more since last month 🙂
On-screen keyboard:
First, the size and position of the on-screen keyboard are now configurable. You can place it on top or at the bottom and it can take half, a third or a quarter of your screen. We’ve also reviewed a couple of things when it comes to ons-creen keyboards in general. We fixed AT-SPI support (the ability for the Cinnamon keyboard to pop up automatically when you focus on a text entry) and we patched both Onboard and Cinnamon for them not to interfere with each others anymore (which means you’ll be able to use the Cinnamon onscreen keyboard without onboard getting in the way, but you’ll also be able to use onboard in Cinnamon if you want).
GNOME Online Accounts:
Cinnamon 3.6 supports GNOME Online Accounts. Among other things, this support makes it possible to browse Google Drive and OwnCloud in Nemo.
GNOME Online Accounts support in Cinnamon 3.6
Libinput support:
The Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with the libinput driver. Cinnamon 3.6 now fully support both Synaptics and Libinput and ships with an “automatic” configuration which adapts well to most touchpads no matter which driver you’re using.
Other improvements:
There’s no real point in listing them all. You’re better off looking at github for a comprehensive list. There are a huge number of bug fixes of course, and some things are really technical… for instance we’ve improved something really important in the way Nemo extensions work, both for performance and stability. The Alt-tab switcher received a few improvements too.. windows from all workspaces can now be displayed and whether or not to push minimized windows to the end of the selection is now configurable.
PIA Manager
The PIA Manager now runs in user mode (i.e. without admin privileges and so without the need to enter a password).
PIA Manager
This tool makes it trivial to connect your computer to your PIA account and a PIA VPN. It will be available in the Linux Mint 18.3 repositories and featured in the Software Manager.
Redshift
Redshift will be installed by default in Linux Mint 18.3. This tool adapts the color temperature of your screen based on the time of day, making it look warmer at night to reduce the impact on your eyes.
It will be available in your Accessories menu.
Info Reports
In addition to crash reports, Mintreport will be able to show information report.
Unlike the release notes which show the same generic information to everybody, Mintreport is able to detect and scan elements of your computers to target information and only show you what’s relevant to you.
Here’s a simple example of this is in action:
Information reports in Linux Mint 18.3
In the screenshot above Mintreport detected the fact that you didn’t configure your Timeshift backups.
As we go along we’ll ship more and more reports through Mintreport and we’ll be able to assist you and guide you through situations that are specific but for which we know workarounds or even solutions.
XApps improvements
The Xed minimap
The text editor Xed now features a minimap.
The PDF reader Xreader now detects DPI and the size of your monitor to make the size of the document you see on the screen match the size of the paper in real life when using a 100% zoom level.
Sponsorships:
Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:
Donations in September:
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Interesting news. I actually expected KDE to be dropped at some point. You were stretching yourself to much. Also I like how redshift will be a default now. Great work, keep it up!
On the new website design… I actually made a dark theme for it (also with mint-y-dark colors) here:
https://github.com/RaitaroH/LinuxMint_Blog-Deepdark
Nice, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RaitaroH/LinuxMint_Blog-Deepdark/master/Images/Mint-Y-Dark_Colors2.png looks pretty cool. We’re sticking with what we have for now though. Next we’ll hopefully revamp the main site and the community website.
Just thought it would be really cool to have some sort of similarity between the theme on the desktop and on the website. So you use a dark theme on the desktop, what a coincidence, the website has a dark theme just like it.
Just imagine Plasma 5 + all my themes with the breeze dark color palette 😉 SPOILER: It’s pretty awesome.
What about X.org 1.19 and Nvidia Prime tearing issues?
Also Lightdm hanging bug on Pascal gpu’s?
Please include links to the relevant bug reports.
Described issue happens for me at Mint 18.2 , with Asus Fx553VD.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm/+bug/1637733
Because of that i switched to Mdm , at least prime select via terminal works with it.
The other problem is , Nvidia Prime sync is works with X.org 1.19. Otherwise ; screen tearings are happening even at 60 hz.
I’ll be sad to see the KDE version of Linux Mint retired. I feared this was coming, but I understand. :-/
Me to. Very bad news for KDE users. Linux Mint was the best.
Should discontinue all, and focus this time only on your Cinnamon project.
Yeah, I was always wondering if it is worth of efforts to support so many desktops. Cinnamon & XFCE (for older machines) would be enough.
I understand that some people think of XFCE as just for older computers, but I never understood this thinking. Yes, it runs well on older hardware, but guess what – it runs well on newer hardware too! I used to be a KDE user (and fvwm way back) but switched to XFCE many years ago and have never seen a reason to switch. I tried Cinnamon and MATE, but XFCE is just what I need.
Like mweishaar, I gotta say that Xfce is not just for older systems. (I guess that comment triggered me, lol.) I’m running Xfce on very new and decently powerful systems. Lots of advantages to this.
You’re right. Although some DEs are generally more suited to some use cases, and they all have pros and cons (if they didn’t, one would clearly dominate), it’s largely down to taste and the feeling of being at home. If you’re enjoying Xfce it doesn’t matter whether you’re on older specs or not. The only thing that matters is how much you’re enjoying using your computer. If Xfce is key to that then it’s the right DE for you. It’s all very subjective really and as long as you’re happy you can’t be wrong really 🙂
Hell no!
Since development for Cinnamon can also be used for Xfce and Mate, their continued is not the drain on Linux Mint that KDE was. Since Mate is my desktop of choice, I certainly hope Linux Mint continues releasing it. (But I’m KDE people felt the same.)
Xfce is the best version of Mint. to be honest, I think it should be the main version. Please don´t drop Xfce version. It is faster, more powerful and flexible than the Cinnamon´s. Thanks for your excellent work!
Wow Really more powerful and flexible than cinnamon??? Have you even tried cinnamon? Xfce is great but it lacks a lot of features that cinnamon has. I agree it is faster and less resource hungry. However if your hardware is fast enough then why not use Cinnamon with all it’s easy to use features? I use Cinnamon as Xfce is frustrating and lacks features needed in today’s computing environment.
As soon as Mint becomes ‘Cinnamon only’ I am gone , as will be many others.
I agree. As others have mentioned, I run xfce on a modern, powerful system and it flies. I’ve tried the other two options, but always come back to xfce. None of the others offer anything extra, aside from fluff – which is why xfce will always feel snappier.
Trapper I believe the vast majority of Mint users use Cinnamon.
It is clear that Mint’s primary focus is on Cinnamon.
It is probably an astute business decision to go with Cinnamon ONLY, that is where the passion of the developers is.
Us that prefer other desktops will migrate to some other OS, and eventually we will be glad for the change.
Mate, KDE, and Xfce and the other desktops are all represented in other venues, and those other Developers have a strong passion for them.
The big +++ is that we will have more features, less cruft, and Stability.
Clem: thanks for all you have done. There will always be a place in my heart for LMDE (Mate).
Me Too XFCE Is Awesome but i think all the editions of mint have it right as well i have tried them all and like them
i don’t know if it’s possible. but it would be cool if you could make your updatetool available for upcoming kubuntu/neon releases. discover and muon are garbage. like a ppa to add or something like that
Clem,
Re the suggestion to move to bleeding edge distros like Arch to follow KDE closely, Manjaro has a really nice KDE flavour, and unlike Arch it’s ready-to-go as soon as the user installs Manjaro. That way users who aren’t quite comfortable with setting up Arch can still get a great KDE setup and still have a rolling distro. 🙂
Hi Fred & all
An alternative to your good alternative is openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s giving me the best Plasma5 specifically, & Linux generally, experience i’ve had to date. Though it is a rolling release [something i traditionally avoided for stability & reliability reasons], what won me over to it last May/June was discovering its brilliant combo of BtrFS with Snapper rollbacks, + openQA automated testing before each snapshot release. Hence i get to enjoy current Plasma & pgm packages, with strong stability & reliability.
I’ll forever have a soft spot in my heart for Mint, as my first Linux experience was Mint 13 then 16 Cinnamon, which showed me that there was MUCH better choices for me than Windows. It was then also Mint that introduced me to KDE with 16 then 17, & i’ve loved KDE ever since. Additionally, the Mint forum / community is wonderful.
Ongoing best wishes to the Mint team… sad news [KDE], but i fully understand.
Another non-Debian-based alternative: Solus 4 (where their own Budgie desktop is migrating to Qt) is going to have a KDE edition according to the latest patreon post.
It would be nice to have a better optimization of AMD proc and video. On my pc (asus with amd a10 and amd graphic) i can’t use cinnamon cause i have some glitches and screen tearing :(. The system seems to be slow and it’s so annoying.
It’s for that reason I still use Mint Cinnamon 17.3 (and ubuntu’s 3.13.X.X HWE kernels) which support the apparently legacy AMD driver for my Athlon 5350’s R3 graphics. I find screen tearing a major annoyance
Now i’m on Mint 18.2 mate and it works very well. I’ve tried many distros and every time I encountered problems on their DE (unity, gnome shell, cinnamon). surprisingly kde is fluid. maybe just a little bit slow but it runs well. Fedora KDE it’s impressive, very few bugs (unfortunately thunderbird crashes on plasma).Anyhow mate is the best gtk compromise.
In future will you retire XFCE?
No. The audience for the Xfce edition is small as well but the situation is very different than with KDE. Xfce requires very little work, it’s very stable and doesn’t change much. Also the huge majority of the work we focus on applies to it and contributes to making it better. Xfce itself is small and modular and easy to fix/patch, and around that every time we work on an Xapp, or the DM or a Mint tool, it makes the improves every single one of the 3 GTK editions, Xfce included.
Glad to hear ! 🙂
I have 6 netbooks at home, one at work, my mother’s, my father’s in law, and all of them are XFCE. And (as it has been said before), it’s a question of hardware only for two of them (moreover I use the 32 bit flavour for these two guys since they cannot support 64bit; I am very pleased 32 bit versions are not discontinued, as they can be elsewhere..).
I recently switched to 18.2 at work; I have couple issues now: my cairo-dock starts freezing at boot (working well after kill/restart), sometimes content is blinking in Chrome, and I had a really weird text transcoding behaviour in xed (for instance a csv export would be totally scrambled by xed); have to switch back to gedit. Btw, I don’t get the X-app purpose; couldn’t you just add a simlink (in update-alternatives maybe) to a existent app, for example xed -> gedit, instead of rewriting your own ?
17.3 is great: rock solid (best release since… Isadora IMO). Hope 18.3 will be better than 18.2 and as reliable as 17.3.
Suggestion: maybe you can reassign old KDE ressources to a new flavour of LMDE… hum.. let’s say… LDME-XFCE for instance 😉
Anyway, thanks a lot for the good job. All my (digital) life rely on LinuxMint !
RIP LMDE
Did you read a different article to the rest of us?
LOL
No. I use Mate. I dislike Cinnamon greatly.
perhaps I could install Mate on the LMDE 3 Cinnamon spin, we shall see.
Why is LMDE with MATE being dropped? Given that MATE is lighter than Cinnamon and given that LMDE is the answer for those wanting a lighter and faster Linux Mint, LMDE with MATE is the best edition of Linux Mint for old computers. That said, my favorite distro is now SparkyLinux (Debian stable edition with the LXDE desktop), which I regard as the unofficial LMDE. I’m not sure why Linux Mint still maintains LMDE given that the Ubuntu-based editions, Cinnamon, and MATE are its bread and butter, but some people have said that LMDE is a hedge against disruptions in the Ubuntu project.
It’s explained in the blog post. One of the reasons is the one you mentioned.
For the record, KDE is a community, and Plasma is a desktop environment.
Also for the record, and not to nitpick, the framework is “Qt” 😉
Cheers!
YUP 🙂 I thought this was nitpicking LOL
Farewell mint
damn guys. i’m so proud of you for making linux mint better and better every day!
Thank you all for your effort to do this and give me the chance to use linux without hassle!
(use linux mint cinnamon 18.2)
This sounds like good news. I think it’s a good decision to drop KDE and put more focus on Cinnamon, which i think is the best DE there is. More polish and more integration and functions will lead to good things i hope.
Dropping KDE is probably the worst and saddest news I have ever seen here.
Even though I have been using Cinnamon for the past two years, I kept a close eye on KDE development and improvements.
I can’t say I have been more impressed in the last years by other DEs than KDE.
Your Cinnamon is good but it falls short compared KDE.
Latest releases of KDE are awesome in terms of performance.
I have been testing latest KDE releases (in KDE neon and Kubuntu) running on cheap flash drive on my 8 years old laptop and I can say that it runs faster than Cinnamon (LM 18.2) installed on the SSD inside.
Looking at RAM usage I don’t think I’ve seen recently a DE consuming as little as 3330-340 MB, not even MATE.
Let me tell you another thing that it always failed for me in Cinnamon and MATE editions.
Browsing the files shared from my other local computers using Windows.
Guess what, I have never been able to access them from Linux.
Always got a vague error message like “It doesn’t work or server not available”.
I tried installing SAMBA and what others said, but I never succeeded.
I tried a few days ago in Kubuntu 17.10′ Dolphin and got a error message like “hey, you cannot access the Windows network, because you don’t have SAMBA, do you want to install it now?”
I clicked yes and a few seconds later SAMBA was installed and I could finally access the network and my shared files. I was really impressed how easy and user-friendly it was in this DE!
Another thing that always made me sad in Linux is the missing the creation date/time of files.
This is very helpful for a lot of reasons.
I was happy that statx(2) was added in Kernel 4.11 which could allow to read this attribute
I was even happier to see that one Dolphin (KDE’s file manage and one of my favorites) is adding support for it.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Applications-17.08
Seeing all these features that I want in KDE…
I decided to move to it from Cinnamon!… and now you’re dropping it! Hope you can see why I’m disappointed.
Exactly what I thought about KDE, it improved a lot lately and even I am a (old)gnome-guy I must admit that the performance of KDE is now superior. Maybee some time in the Future I will leave Mint in Favour of KDE-Neon.
Maybee Mint could make 18.4(or 19) a performance release instead of adding new Stuff.
Mint 18.2 KDE with prelinking implemented absolutely screams.
I switched to Neon KDE. It needs some minor polishing but it is one of the fastest and stable KDE distro’s I have tested. Only KaOS is faster but it lacks the Debian/Ubuntu base.
KDE-Ubuntu (Kubuntu) is always there. I don’t think there is any difference between LM-KDE 18.2 and Kubuntu 16.04.
It is. E.g. I’m going to miss the Linux Mint updater.
Yes, exactly. The Linux Mint updater in the KDE edition has been easier to use to keep my system up-to-date than in the few other distros I’ve tried.
I guess I’ll have no choice but to try Kubuntu now, unless there’s some way to just install the Mint updater on Kubuntu?
Same here, I also think the Mint updater is the best from all distros I have tested.
Also for me LM KDE seems more beautiful than Kubuntu and any other KDE distro.
These guys really undestand how a beautiful desktop should look like.
Even taking something as silly as wallpapers, there’s a huge difference.
Kubuntu has the ugliest default wallpapers I have ever seen.
+1
I love LM installer too (I enjoy it from the Cinnamon desktop). I think it’s just an application written in python (https://github.com/linuxmint/mintupdate). It should work fine in Kubuntu. Someone could write an application, which will install LM-KDE stuff not present in Kubuntu, to help people move smoothly to their new environment. What do Linux Mint people think about this?
Julian Cardich: have you tried SolydXK or Debian KDE? There are many others but I recommend both.
(I am a mate user, so I express no opinion on the result)
Kubuntu has been very unstable since the move from kde 3.5. Installing base Ubuntu and adding KDE packages was far more stable. Mint has been the only distor I have found with stable, reliable, and acceptably up to date KDE. Additionally my wife tried to get involved with the kubuntu project and they were *MASSIVE* assholes to her. Using Kubuntu is not an option for me. I am so disappointed Mint is dropping KDE, but thank you very much for having done it so well for so long.
Daniel to ease the pain try to copy over your LAN a big (like 1Gb) file in dolphin using ssh (or SAMBA) and
then try with Cinnamon Nemo (= 10x faster) maybe you’ll be less disappointed 🙂
If I can make Cinnamon’s default file manager to browse my Windows network, I will try.
Until now I haven’t succeeded.
Nemo allowed to me share files with Win with just a few clicks but SAMBA in MintKDE is an absolute PITA to do the same thing. That said, I’ve been using Mint KDE for years. But…..I like KDE so much I might be going back to PCLinuxOS for their KDE desktop.
As a KDE user myself. I couldn’t beg more for continued support. I was planning to install it in yet another computer and reading the first lines of the article makes me think they could at least keep it around even if it is not going to get as much polish or attention as it used to. Things like these make me feel the community is not stable.
Huzzah!
Sincerely, Linux Mint should only stay on Cinnamon, let go of all environments and use this time only for your own project. Linux Mint should get out of dependency on Ubuntu, and use Debian as the only foundation and begin to build its own base on it, just as it did with Ubuntu.
No, that’s not the plan.
We spend time on what people enjoy, and we try to maximize focus on the areas where we can make a difference. The Xapp project goes in that direction and allows us to improve the Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce editions all at once and without efforts, by focusing on the same libraries and the same set of apps and tools.
Abandoning the Ubuntu LTS base while this is the most developed and the most popular makes no sense at all.
I agree with Gabriel on the Debian base issue, tbh. The Ubuntu base is the most developed and the most popular because it’s the most developed and the most popular — the reasoning is circular. LMDE’s audience is smaller because it receives less development, it’s undersold, and is clearly presented as something of an ugly step-sister. There’s no reason why this *needs* to be the case. In the past I’ve tended to use the Ubuntu version myself for these reasons (it clearly gets more love and polish from the devs), and then there’s the PPA issue — but Flatpak developments will significantly alter this dynamic, and I can’t help thinking that if LMDE got the same dev love that the “main” version gets, it would be better still.
I love Mint and I love the way you guys make decisions (and “because it’s what the devs. want to spend time on” is a perfectly decent rationale), and I’ll continue to support the project (in every sense) going forwards, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for getting prepared to rip the Ubuntu band-aid off.
Maybe you’re not thinking of abandoning the Ubuntu LTS base because it’s the most developed, but I can read over the Internet a lot these days that “Canonical Teams Up with Microsoft” and I cannot help but wonder how much time will pass until Canonical, being such a close friend to Microsoft, will start putting the spyware that exists in latest Windows versions in Ubuntu too.
We all know that Canonical put spyware in Ubuntu in the past for money.
Why do you think they won’t do the same when Microsoft gives them the sum of money the want?
Can I ask how do you know that Ubuntu is still safe to be used as base?
Do you review its source code?
Hi Daniel,
Please don’t spread FUD or you will get banned from here.
I’m sorry to see that a honest concern that I have you consider it FUD.
As I see, I have to ask these kind of questions in private, but I don’t know where.
You can delete my previous comment if that’s what you want.
I am very sorry that this issue has you so upset. I think the LinuxMint team are making the best decision for the whole community. May I suggest you try Manjaro. It is very usable and good distro that has KDE.
I would agree, I[ve been using LM for at least 2 years and I am impressed with the stability of it having the Ubuntu packaging. It would be a waste of resource to ditch something that really works.
Eine Volk, eine distro, eine DE… for that, we have MS.
Leave my MATE live, it’s more stable and faster then ANY Cinnamon!
Agreed, but I’d also have XFCE as an alternative for slower machines.
Very good decision to drop KDE and concentrate on Cinnamon etc. From a users perspective there was very little difference from Linux Mint KDE compared to Kubuntu already.
Clem,
Great news on the PIA manager and LMDE3. The flatpaks project also looks excellent.
As for the impending death of Linux Mint KDE, I think others also realize that it just wasn’t viable to manage so many desktop versions (Gnome Toolkits and KDE Toolkits).
Is there a concerted effort by distros to consolidate environments. I might be wrong on this, but I believe that:
– Fedora 26 now features GNOME as a default desktop environment
– Debian 9 now features GNOME as a default desktop environment
– Ubuntu 17.10 now features GNOME as a default desktop environment
While initially there may seem less choice for users, consolidation means more effort focused on fewer concurrent projects. Given that Linux Mint uses so many Gnome apps, I welcome these developments 🙂
Hi Gerry,
The flatpaks are great and they’re particular handy to run GNOME apps 🙂
We’re not using GNOME but we’re very much in a GNOME/GTK ecosystem. There are a huge number of similarities and code/design inherited across not only GNOME and its MATE/Cinnamon siblings, but also Xfce. A lot of what happens in any of these projects can be ported easily to the other 3.
In my opinion, the GNOME/GTK world focuses very much on simple and easy to use DEs and applications. Compared to this, KDE is “heavier” in the sense that it/its applications often have more functionality or settings. For example, check Dolphin vs. Nemo. I believe that this is also the reason, why many big distributions rely on GNOME.
And this is the reason why I like KDE. You can set almost everything for your needs.
Yes, me too. I was using Mint Cinnamon some time ago (didn’t like the look of KDE4) and switched to Kubuntu when KDE (Plasma) 5 was available.
Don’t get me wrong: I really like the community of Mint but technically it didn’t make any sense to me to use KDE with Mint instead of Ubuntu directly.
Thank you for the update.
I am enjoying LMDE, however just a little worried from a security point of view. Flash does not seem to be getting any updates anymore? LMDE version is stuck at 27.0.0.130 and current version is 27.0.0.170? (There were updates inbetween also, prior to reaching 27.0.0.170)
Hi Jacques,
We’ll get this checked. We usually get notified of new releases. We’ll have an update for this ASAP.
Thank you for the flash update. Looking forward to Cindy 🙂
Have a great weekend!
Thanks Jacques 😉
lo mejor de Linuxmint era KDE y su politica de actualizaciones que no se encuentra en otra distro, KDE es superior a XFCE, MATE Y CINNAMON en rendimiento en UNA PC de 7 años de antiguedad
Me gustaría ver un video o algo que valide esto… porque dudo mucho que KDE tenga mejor rendimiento que XFCE en equipos viejos, o nuevos.
Hola Juan,
Básicamente, si lo intentas tú mismo, encontrarás a KDE corriendo en todo tipo de cosas. Sus requisitos de sistema no son diferentes de Gnome. Ahora no se puede decir que todo funcionará sin problemas y rápido, pero si tiene 1 gigabyte de memoria y potencia de procesamiento de 1,5 GHz, encontrará que KDE funciona lenta, lenta pero funcionalmente. Al final, el rendimiento es una cuestión de perspectiva. Algunas personas se acostumbrarán al rendimiento débil y no se entusiasmarán con él.
De cualquier manera, KDE no es un entorno para computadoras débiles, no se desarrolla con la idea de computadoras de este tipo.
Pero le asegura que a algunas personas les gusta la forma en que funcionan las cosas en KDE, a pesar del hecho de que su PC hubiera funcionado mejor en Xfce o LXDE.
Para empezar, LinuxMint aún recibe actualizaciones y soporte del equipo, así que quédate con nosotros un poco más, luego, en abril de 2018, se lanzará la versión 19 de LinuxMint sin la versión de KDE, entonces es hora de cambiar a Kubuntu 19.04 LTS. LinuxMint se basa en Ubuntu LTS, así que creo que es el lugar correcto para migrar allí, Kubuntu 19.04 LTS disfrutará de 5 años de actualizaciones y soporte como LinuxMint. también disfrutará del producto de un equipo enfocado solo en KDE. Además de disfrutar el mundo que conoce, puede continuar usando archivos PPA y DEB, esta realmente me parece la mejor recomendación para usuarios de LinuxMInt KDE.
Sea como fuere. Soy usuario de KDE y realmente me preocupa que me quiten mi entorno de escritorio preferido en mi distro preferida! Ojalá que al menos no lo hagan desaparecer por completo!
Wow, it looks like Linux Mint will have the best Flatpak support of all distros! Thank you a much for all the great work!
Hi,
What I sad day for me.
I just made my first donation because I wanted to support OS which supports KDE so well, got info than it will be published, and in that info, I read blog post about dropping KDE.
I understand why you do it and probably for you it is much more efficient.
From my perspective it is the first and last donation for Mint, at least until Cinnamon becomes comparable to KDE(imho so no offense).
Will try to find something else.
From my perspective KDE is just much better than other solutions provided by Mint.
Still I hope you for the best with your choices and better focus, just without my small donations 🙂
Good luck and bye.
Ubuntu 17.10 Gnome features enabling of captive portals (e.g. for wifi hotspots in cafe’s etc.); will this be available in Mint 18.3 / Cinnamon 3.6?
Ubuntu 17.10 (GNOME) cannot even switch keyboards with Alt-Shift. And it displays a desktop featuring a shredder! You have to install too many extensions to be able to do a fraction of the configurations you can do in LM Cinnamon. It cannot install Glade from the GUI. Etc etc.
Ubuntu 17.10 features latest low level software (kernel 4.13, Gnome 3.26 etc), but it is completely unsuitable for the end user.
Hi,
Please stay on topic. This isn’t the place to promote or to criticize other projects.
We love Linux and Ubuntu 18.04 will you bring a new version called 19.03 for example and comaptible with 18.04 Ubuntu or everything will be based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Please let us know what is future looks like.
Mint 18.3 is based on Ubuntu 16.04.
Mint 19, 19.1, 19.2 and 19.3 will be based on Ubuntu 18.04.
What about wayland?
What about it?
Any plans to support it?
Well, from a Mint point of view we’ve no plan to use it just yet. Xorg is a much better solution still in the scope of our distribution. Wayland is promising because it will solve some important issues we’re having with Xorg but it’s far from ready in terms of what it supports and what supports it.
From a development point of view nobody’s really asking for it, Arch, Fedora are happy to use MATE and Cinnamon as they are.. and nobody’s really working on it whether it’s in MATE or Cinnamon.
We’re not opposed to seeing it happen, it’s just something that “might” work “one day” and it’s not a priority. It’s also something that requires a significant amount of work so it doesn’t make sense to look into it much at the moment. Things might change in the future, but this is the current situation.
I think it will help newcomers to Linux a lot if there will be a mousewheel speed function built in Cinnamon. I use imwheel and works very well. I think it is not much work to bluid this inside Cinnamon and help users to take the Linux highway from Windows.
Hi Peter,
Can you describe what this does for you and how you use it?
I’m not peter, but I would also like to see this. I like to be able to scroll one line at a time, rather than the default 3. I find it allows me to more easily/carefully scroll through text when reading. The extra precision enhances my control and makes scrolling less clunky. Its one of the first things I check/change/add when setting an OS up or trying out a new distro.
A small team has to focus its efforts, for the sake of efficiency. So I understand your decision to drop KDE. Of course you will catch some flak from disappointed KDE users, but that’s inevitable….
The new developments in Cinnamon are promising!
Thanks for an early announcement. Time is needed to digest the news.
I’d like to say that may Cinnamon be better than KDE some day.
I have a strange feeling that Clem can do it. But he needs to concentrate all the efforts for such a purpose. So this announcement… good…
I’ll be trying Linux Mint Cinnamon time to time. It’s the first linux I’ve installed (Olivia perhaps) after all. But Linux Mint KDE (KDE4 then) became my home very soon after it.
Ok, maybe a top of Mint 19, let’s see… I have Fedora installed but it feels like a university lab though quite polished. I’ve got Neon but it’s still only a demo so far. Never used Arch. Too lazy to have fun in trying slackware kde…
And once again, may Cinnamon be better than KDE some day. Thank you
Cinnamon is a nice desktop environment but it really lacks many many things to become as good as KDE. Functionality, customizability and even the cube desktop and transparency/ opacity eye candy are still far from being as good as they are in KDE. As a KDE user myself I can’t help but worry about the future of my computers because this means they will take away from me my favorite desktop in my favorite distro.
Good Job Linux Mint Team on your latest and greatest!
While killing KDE Edition might be sad news, I’m kind of happy at the same time, because it means you have one less platform to have to work on, and have more free time for making the remaining flavours better.
No matter what, I’ll always be there for you guys, giving you some extra unique features (via GitHub) that I may make on the way with feren OS, and I’m sure ALL of your users will always be by your side, and to be honest, it’s also nice that you’ve got a Plan B, for, like you said, if Ubuntu ever went kaput as a Desktop Linux OS… Though, there again, given you’ve called LMDE an experienced-users-recommended OS in the past, what’d happen if Ubuntu went kaput, would you have to optimise the GUI yourselves in LMDE?
Overall, nice to see your improvements for Cinnamon, and THANK YOU for adding Online Accounts in Settings integration, finally, don’t need to install GNOME Control Center for that, and it’s also nice to see you adding Flatpak… As always, Keep the Good Work up Mint Team! 🙂
I knew it was coming. KDE is a very different environment than all the rest. And now, it is changing more rapidly. It is not easy to keep pace. Although I primarily use Cinnamon from Mint, I used the KDE version from time to time. They were all mostly pleasant experiences, but sometimes I felt wanting.
Anyway, I’d say best of luck with your endeavors with Cinnamon, MATE, xfce, and LMDE. They are all fantastic ! Looking for more goodies to come !!!!
Wow. That’s what I called a great news blogpost!
I want to return to Mint (using Manjaro for now), but I can’t stand the flickering problem in Google Chrome. Was there any investigation put into that matter? Xorg related?
Have you considered adding FWUPD in the new Mint Store ?
Thanks for all the work.
Hi Claude,
fwupd is installed by default.
I can’t comment on Chrome, I’m not aware of the issue. If it’s a bug in Chrome itself the fact that it’s proprietary won’t help much with troubleshooting or fixing it. Is it specific to Mint or Cinnamon? or Cinnamon+Mint? If it’s specific to us, let us know so we can look into it.
I’m not sure if the “flickering” mentioned is what I’ve experienced, but if so, it happens / happened to me on both Chrome and Chromium, and in both Cinnamon and KDE.
I was able to solve it by disabling hardware acceleration. Not sure that helps pin down the issue, and as always, “your milage may vary.”
It has to be a Mint issue, because no problem on Manjaro Cinnamon. And I never experienced that issue in any other distros and DE I’ve tried, Ubuntu based or not.
Like Paul S. says, yes, disabling hardware acceleration can help fix the problem in Mint. But I don’t want to do that… I want hardware acceleration.
If it happens in both KDE and Cinnamon it’s not related to the DE/WM. In that case it might be a driver/mesa-xorg-stack/kernel issue. I would recommend to try a newer kernel and to experiment with different drivers.
The problem was there in Manjaro but disappeared when they transitioned to X.org server 1.19 from what I heard at the time.
I tried with the latest kernel possible in Mint and added a PPA to get a more recent Mesa. No luck. I’m on a Dell XPS 13 (9360), all Intel.
My computer unfortunately is not powerful enough to run Cinnamon fluently, so I will have to drop Linux Mint and go back to Kubuntu. It’s really unfortunate for me, as i found in Mint the ultimate Linux distribution so far.
Hi Philippe,
KDE is usually regarded as the heaviest edition, at least in RAM usage. If the GPU is the bottleneck, I would suggest you try MATE or Xfce, they’re very light on resources.
I use Linux Mint MATE edition on my netbook which is even more poor in performances that my desktop computer, and I will continue to do so !
Well that’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone write they are using KDE and can’t use other DE because they can’t run it fluently. We’re really talking about ‘the’ KDE here? The king of “I don’t have anywhere near the hardware to run this” for over a decade? I’ve played 3D games that take less resources (and that includes Skyrim through Wine), maybe you have misconfigured drivers or are a victim of a Cinnamon issue that makes it run poorly on your hardware?
If it is so, it would be nice if you tested it and filed a bug report.
Myths everywhere…
Plasma has quite low hardware requirements, regardless of what the legends might say.
Have you try KDE recently ? It’s significantly lighter in daily usage than Cinnamon.
You should try lastest KDE versions like in Kubuntu 17.10 or KDE neon
While in the past KDE was pretty slow, now…
On my 8 years old Acer 6935G laptop with nouveau open source graphics driver…
I can confirm that KDE is the fastest DE and it consumes the least amount of RAM of them all (330-500 MB)
It seems even faster than MATE.
Cinnamon is slow but usable and it consumes a lot of RAM.
The amount of RAM consumed by Cinnamon varies greatly from one computer to another, and it depends a lot on your graphics drivers. For instance Cinnamon is known to use much more RAM with NVIDIA drivers. I think this is down to Clutter and the toolkits used by Cinnamon.
Support AMD Ryzen from the box?
Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with a 4.10 kernel. I hope this will help a little bit.
Hi,
will we have an option to install 4.4.x lts kernel series? I am asking because i have a very old macbook that doesn’t play well neither with 4.8.x nor 4.10.x kernels.
Thank you very much.
thx!
TBH I’m not surprised about KDE – I jumped on the Mint train around Mint 16 and KDE simply didn’t fit the whole thing from the beginning. All the other news are amazing – integrated redshift and Wayland support are basically the only things that made me consider switching to GNOME with its hellish “one size fits all” interface, and stale apps are the only thing that made me consider switching to a more bleeding-edge distro (or even forking Arch because while I like Arch, using in on day-to-day basics is a bloody pain in the nethers).
You solved two of these problems, and tossed some flavour in there on the way – and to say I’m satisfied with your work is an euphemism. (although native Wayland support is something I earnestly await)
I wish I could afford anything more than food so I could contribute to this amazing project. Good job, seriously.
LMDE 3 will become more important as soon as Ubuntu drops 32bit images as it was announced. Debian will be the only option for older hardware. LMDE/Mate combo runs fast in powerfull pentium machines and I doubted many times to switch to Debian completely. As for Flatpak, it grew a lot in the last year. I don’t have an opinion yet but it seems it’s the direction that many people is following.
Hi Horacio,
The decision made by Ubuntu to drop 32-bit ISOs does not impact us, whether it’s in the scope of LMDE (obviously) or in the scope of Linux Mint.
>Debian will be the only option for older hardware
It’s not true. You still can install latest 32bit Ubuntu by using mini.iso
Thank for your interest in mousewheel speed.
What I meant : mousewheel scroll speed, just like subscribed on:
https://mintguide.org/other/643-setup-the-mouse-scroll-wheel-speed.html
I think it is very easy to do even for me as a newbe :
The script of Nick (see link above in the middle point 2 is very easy).
Only thing what I have changed is on point 3, the startup in:
imwheel -b “4 5”
With this setting also the forward and backward buttons of the mouse will work after a restart.
I hope I could help you with this.
Ah I see..
You might be able to use xinput for this… “xinput list” to find the number of your device, then “xinput list-props 5” (where 5 is your device number), and then maybe “xinput set-prop 5 ‘Evdev Scrolling Distance’ 1 3 5″… something like that? https://askubuntu.com/questions/255890/how-can-i-adjust-the-mouse-scroll-speed. I wonder if this could be done by CSD (Cinnamon Settings Daemon) directly… I’ll add it to the roadmap.
Thank you for adding this to the roadmap. If this will be working I think many users will be thankfull to you.
Right move to drop KDE IMO. I fully understand your path forward to focus on development that easily cross pollinates to the other GTK based desk tops.
KDE Plasma 5 is a very comprehensive and visually stunning DE – the top in both categories of all DEs (Win 10 and OSX included) i’d say. I have some ergo/workflow issues with using it, but I will give credit where it’s due – the work on it over the past two years has been amazing and the resource usage at its level of performance is simply game changing.
Maybe you can focus some time on improving animation quality in Cinnamon and bring it closer to Plasma in this regard. Not sure if this area is a challenge viz. GTK v. Qt, but as I think Cinnamon is #1 for ease of use, comfort and responsiveness by a wide margin, a little more silkiness with menu drop downs and cross fades would make it unbeatable as far as I’m concerned.
Looking forward to 18.3!!!!
@Nomen luni
Oh, didn’t know that about the shift to Xorg 1.19 and problems before on Manjaro. I just installed it. Anyway, that’s why I thought that it might be Xorg related on Mint.
Clem, a suggestion for LMDE 3, stretch out just a touch and add a minimal gui version like Sparky does (Openbox with FB Panel). That will provide a light, easy to use starting point for people to stay within the LinuxMint family, using the normal distro for day to day work and LMDE lite for building up devices such as a HTPC or reviving old hardware where they can later choose the most appropriate desktop. And when that proves popular…. a Raspberry Pi version 😉
Honestly, though, a LMDE LITE version might prove very interesting, especially if you encourage people to feed back what they’re doing with it.
I second the motion. Give it a name like Slim Mint, Thin Mint or Mint Julep. Would be a fun project.
Good choices. KDE didn’t seem to fit from the beginning. Some people here are right though, Cinnamon doesn’t look anywhere near as nice as stock KDE5 and that’s not just a preference thing. I have to spend a good while looking for a suitable GTK + cinnamon theme that matches and looks clean. Im not sure why but the scaling of the GUI elements on Cinnamon look a tad grainy ? It’s fine on a laptop but on a larger monitor it’s easier to see the ‘fluffy’ edges. Then there is mediocre font rendering which looks nicer on XFCE & MATE .
That might be something to tweak i read that Solus devs spent a lot of time perfecting the font rendering and appearance to get a crisp readable look comparable to Windows / Mac.
My requests would be:
1. Allow the launcher icons to be clicked to minimise / maximise so as they can act like a dock.. This way the side panel can reflect gnome / unity or a bottom panel can reflect Plank / Docky.
2. Allow the panel to grow bigger than it currently can. At the moment the panel does not grow large enough for me on a 2560×1440 display. Not large enough to create a ‘dock’ effect.
3. Animations .. more slick ones please 🙂
Great distribution. Keep up the good work.
Well, I began using Linux Mint with v5 (Elyssa)… KDE flavor, and it was a fine “fit from the beginning”. However, when KDE “matured” to v4 (Plasma) I switched to Mint’s Main edition, choosing MATE over Cinnamon when the road forked — like KDE’s Plasma, Cinnamon is too heavy for my older (32-bit) hardware. So, I won’t mourn the passing of LM’s KDE version; however, I will not be sanguine about LMDE3 offering (only?) the Cinnamon desktop — will MATE be available as .deb packages, or will we be required to go the “make install” route?
2nd that. MATE is lighter, faster and – more stable then Cinnamon. Perfect for LMDE3.
If this is true:
> “Xapp project goes in that direction and allows us to improve the Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce editions all at once and without efforts”
…then I hope to see LMDE Mate, in time.
Hi Jonathan,
MATE 1.16 is available in Debian Stretch.
@Linux Mint: yeah, and MATE 1.18 in available in LMDE 2 (Jessie based). I hope that after LMDE 3 I’ll still be able to use Debian-based distro with up to date MATE like I’ve used to…
Lots of stuff to look forward to. And really good to read about the continued commitment to LMDE which I’ve been using exclusively for the past 5+ years and like very much. For a volunteer-based Linux distro LM really shines!
I’ve always stuck with MATE since version 9 but now I am about ready to give Sonya Cinnamon a whirl. Wish me luck. I did try the beta with KDE and it wouldn’t boot after installing but MATE and Xfce work very well (for me). Thanks for the best OS in the x’verse.
I completely understand the KDE decision, as KDE is pretty much its own universe. For example, I really like Dolphin for its flexibility. It is the only two pane filemanager with search function and mouse lasso selection in listview. But try to use its full functionality in other DEs than KDE. Try to configure other icons than breeze outside KDE.
I really like Nemo too. The only thing I miss is mouse lasso selection in listview. Are there any plans to implement this ?
For me Linux Mint is the perfect choice of distributions! It makes everything possible in an easy way. It won’t stand in your way, it never falls apart. The bleeding edge software in distros like Arch often comes with a price. I like your uncomplicated ways!
Flatpak integration will be a great achievement! It will give everyone just the amount of bleeding edge that is needed, only without the bleeding. Running closed source apps like games and Wine applications in a container will be a great security win!
So please keep doing your great work, and thank you!
I will second to mouse lasso. It should be available for all view options. This would ease my day a lot.
There’s one thing that kept bugging me for years now: Why are you still sticking with the Mint Software Manager? Why did you never decide to fork and base something on Deepin Software Center which was, even five years ago, considered much more pleasing and easier to use for average users? Or anything similar?
Did you try the git master version of mintinstall? It’s been completely revamped, almost rewritten from scratch. This is the second time this happens. You’re looking at one of the oldest managers out there. When it came out there was no Deepin, there was no Software Center, there was nothing of the sort. It came out with a backend and a web server which people contributed data to. To this day we’re still using that data, we’ve collected 7472 screenshots and 51836 reviews… 69% of our 74,000 packages are reviewed. So it’s not only the frontend which matters. Our frontend has been excellent twice in the past and slowly got outdated throughout the years. The version we’ve readied for 18.3 is excellent again. If you feel anything is missing or it could be improved further please let us know how and we’ll be happy to look into it.
you said “we’ll ship more and more reports through Mintreport”
what is “Mintreport”?
It’s a new tool which was developed for Mint 18.3. It was introduced last month on this blog. Its goal is to prepare and show you information and crash reports.
Main site (blog.linuxmint.com) does not have HTTPS support. Blogs throughout the site do? Also whats progresson on 18.3 (or 19)? Thanks!
It does.. it shows 2 posts preceeding the move to HTTPS so these might have elements linking to HTTP still, but it does.
Hope LMDE 3 Like Linux Mint 18,
Nvidia driver can be installed with Driver Manager,
Reduce the problems arising from the installation,
and whether to allow KolourPaint 4 to join the panel.
Thank you very much for your efforts
Hi Thomas,
I’m sorry the Driver Manager will not be ported to Debian, it relies on components which are specific to Ubuntu.
I just installed Mint KDE 18.2 last night. Typical 😛
The worst part is trying to find another distro that “just works”. Anyway, I understand the decision, and look forward to seeing what Cinnamon will offer in the future.
Sorry to hear about Mint dropping KDE… I currently do freelance translations using tools from the KDE ecosystem, but I suppose it’s my responsibility to figure out how to deal with this. Well, if there’s still KDE in 18.3 I will at least have a lot of time.
BRING IT, development realities!
First: Let me just say “Thank You!” for many years of ‘freedom’ & ‘elegance’ with Linux Mint and Linux Mint Debian Edition. Don’t ever underestimate the intrinsic power of those words — your words — from the LM motto. They describe –perhaps even define — the heart & soul of these remarkable distros.
Second: Your vision for LM 19 and beyond seems reasonable, practical, and well-founded. I hope to see it come to life on some future hardware build of mine when LM 19 becomes available later on in 2018. (… And, of course, I’m looking forward to LM 18.3 upgrades for some of my current hardware!)
Third: I was thrilled and greatly relieved to learn that you would continue to develop and support LMDE. Your reasons for doing so make a lot of sense from a developer’s POV; but there are additional considerations from the user’s perspective that you, as developers, should not marginalize. You’ve touted some of them yourselves: “LMDE is…slightly faster … it runs newer packages … users…don’t have to wait for new packages to mature and they usually get to run them first.”
With this in mind, two previous comments to this blogpost are relevant. As Jason Hsu [https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418#comment-137468] notes: “Given that MATE is lighter than Cinnamon and given that LMDE is the answer for those wanting a lighter and faster Linux Mint, LMDE with MATE is the best edition of Linux Mint for old computers;” and as Horacio [https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418#comment-137514] points out: “LMDE/Mate combo runs fast in powerfull pentium machines …”
I can personally attest to the value of these comments; and I have no doubt that millions of older, fully functional computers worldwide could benefit from the LMDE-with-MATE combination — reason enough from a user’s perspective to promote MATE into the LMDE 3 era.
Fourth: There is another, more philosophical (aesthetic?) reason not to abandon MATE for LMDE 3: Elegance. You describe Cinnamon as “sleek, modern, innovative,” and it certainly is all of that and more. But its sleekness and modernity and innovativeness don’t really add up to elegance, but only to an approximation of elegance that, while it has improved over time with your considerable efforts, has yet to reach equality. In contrast, your “stable, robust, traditional” MATE is the very model of classic elegance in a desktop environment. To eliminate it from the (admittedly) strategically important LMDE 3 platform would be to diminish the very soul of Linux Mint.
I implore you: keep (or re-insert) MATE in your plans for LMDE 3. If you need more time to prepare the release, that’s fine; that’s been SOP for LM-KDE and LM-xfce for years. Just — please! — don’t abandon MATE for LMDE 3!
Well said!
May I add my please too? Gnome 2 was a real staple so naturally MATE should be too. Also after years of using MATE, I only recently learned its correct pronunciation LOL.
I’ll 4th that
Maybe someone has written that before I have not read the whole posts yet but…Since there are ubuntu mate and xubuntu, I think you should drop mint mate and mint xfce edition also and focus on cinnamon, because cinnamon is the “trademark” of linux mint
We’re really happy with our Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce editions and with the common set of libraries and apps we develop for all three environments.
I moved from xubuntu to mint-xfce years ago.. I can tell you, they are not the same thing! XFCE is my choice, it’s not just for old machines or old hardware. It’s a clean, simple, lightweight choice. There is no real reason to drop it.
Very sad to hear that MATE edition will be abandoned for LMDE. Cinammon is so buggy and unpredictable – I’m using it about a year now, and plan to come back to MATE since 18.3 released.
Could we at least hope that LMDE MATE comes back if Ubuntu is discontinued and Debian becomes the only basis for Mint?
Well yes, that’s one of the reasons for LMDE to exist.
In my opinion, it is better to focus on making one product better than struggling with two. One bird in hands is always better than two in the bushes.
That said, I like the new redesign of the website. It was long due.
I am very glad with Cinnamon and I hope it will be evaluate to the main desktop (at least 40-50% of all use).
I know these is not the place to mention bugs (and I think it is not a bug of Cinnamon but Google Chrome) but I think it is very annoying:
If i start Google Chrome with Effects on, it will double start and it is very bad for the eyes (with double start I mean double animation at startup) So I have to turn effects off in Cinnamon, what I like to use. Anyone with an other soluitin? (yes I know about Firefox, but Chrome is my preferred browser)
My specs are:
i5 2500k
8Gb
Nvidia 1050Ti
I started my adventure with Linux thanks to Mint. I discovered KDE Plasma DE thanks to Mint. For over a year now I am using Arch with KDE Plasma, but still trying support Mint with some small donation from time to time, because Mint with Cinnamon is probably the best way to discover and learn Linux for beginners and people who escaped from the world of Windows.
As a follow up to
John H.
October 26, 2017 at 5:21 am …….
Perfect points on the LMDE3 and Mate decision. To add just another if I may. We do have some older folks that have been with Mint since the early years, (thankfully pulled from MS) when LMDE came along with Mate it won hands down because of it’s light footprint and ease of setup and tweaks. Abandoning Mate in LMDE3 would easily push our older group and less technical oriented out the door. Cinnamon is great, I use it myself, but i have many friends and family that will not use it because it has some many options and settings. I love Mint period and the community is great ( heck i started with Mandriva ) and have seen the progress all these years and never looked back. I do prefer LMDE and installed it and taught it to many. But going the road with out a Mate option for LMDE3 is one that I can not understand. Simple, Fast, Solid, what else would a venturing away from MS person be looking for. That is the way I framed it when I moved people to Linux Mint ( especially LMDE ) I am not a dev. but have had my time around systems for years now, as hobby and work and when Mint came along it was just what I needed. I knew about Unix and Red Hat, Solaris, Ubuntu….. all that jazz. Mint gave me the ease of use, so then I could start digging into the insides of Linux more and spend less time on the desktop set up.. LMDE3 without Mate to me seems like a set back. I do understand Deb will have it in Repo but for the older and younger users it will not be a simple, move to Cinnamon.
Please do take this as a complaint, it is not one. I think you Mint guys have the right ideas and direction, and as for Clem. Great vision early on to give Linux a fresh, user friendly alternative, that is still paying off today.
Thanks Clem
here here, I’m an older dude
I’m very sad to hear of the end of kde in mint.
I was using MS Windows on the desktop for many
years, even though i had some linux-machines
running like for tv and as server.
The last years i always had a look at kubuntu,
even tried it out a bit on my notebook.
But i started really switching my desktops to
linux when i discovered mint kde.
So i first switched my mothers pc to mint 17.
Then a while later i changed my main pc from
Windows7 to Mint 18.
Now i’m just in the progress of adjusting my
notebook with mint 18 kde to my needs.
Planned next was the transfer of my fathers pc
to mint 18 and then next year the change of my
server to mint kde also.
Not to mention some friends i introduced to mint
kde this year.
And now i was curious to read about the news
about the upcoming mint 18.3 kde.
So you can imagine i was very shocked when i red
about the stop of development for mint kde.
Despite other users here i was not even a bit
aware that abandoning mint kde was even an option.
Despite this fact i wish to thank you for your
excellent work on linux mint so far.
Linux mint kde really sped up and eased my switch
to linux on the desktop.
But what would be the preferred linux with kde now?
I aproach this very conservative, like lts and
don’t need bleeding edge changes.
I will have a look at kubuntu soon.
Further suggestions are welcome.
Hi,
First, you’ve got time. Both 18.2 and 18.3 will be there until 2021.
In terms of alternatives. If you want to switch now, I would recommend Kubuntu 16.04 LTS with the added kubuntu-backports PPA. If you’re happy to wait a bit and switch early next year, I would recommend to wait for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Thank you thank you thank you for addressing the Onboard problem I was struggling with! Means a lot to me, as it is the only reason I’m still using Mint Cinnamon 18.1.
Now theres only one thing for me to ask (very humbly, I must add), and that is an option to boost the volume beyond 100% at my own risk (of course), the way Ubuntu has done. Shouldn’t be too difficult 🙂 The user should be notified of the potential risks involved, of course, but the option per se would be a good thing.
Hi Sven,
The issue isn’t health and safety. This is YOUR computer, not OURS.. 🙂
The issue is convenience. Past 100% we’re using amplification which can cause distortion.. Ideally we’d like to have a widget which stops/pauses/grabs a little bit at the 100% mark but lets you go further past it. This is something we would like not only in the Sound applet, but also on the Sound OSD. It’s not easy to implement and that’s why it hasn’t been done yet.
Actually the user can already do this in Linux Mint. Left click on the volume icon in the tray then, once the volume “box” comes up, click on “Sound Setting”. In the resulting Sound Settings window the user can boost volume to 153%.
I believe this is a function brought over from Ubuntu but I’m not sure.
Hi Kirk,
I think the idea is to make this possible via media-keys/OSD and the applet directly.
Hi Sven, can’t remember if 18.1 was different but on 18.2 Cinnamon the volume can be boosted (to approx 153%). Click on the sound applet, select Sound Settings, and drag the volume slider to the right.
Not sure if that’s what you meant but thought I’d proffer it anyway.
Mick, thanks for your response. However what I meant was a tick box “Allow louder than 100%” the way Ubuntu has it.
Linux Mint, acknowledged, t’was just a wish(ful thinking) 🙂 Otherwise you’re doing great, so once again, thanks!
…… but we need snaps already. Nothing against flatpak, but really…..
Are you considering support snaps as well? Perhaps the way Solus does for example.
apt install snapd
Snap is mentioned, so is AppImage.
Snap looks pretty cool as well but the fact that it only points to a single repository is an issue. It makes it futile for editors to make their own store or for independent stores to thrive thus leading to a situation where Canonical centralizes distribution for all editors and all distributions and act as a middle-man with control over what gets in, what doesn’t, when and how. We’ve seen that with Google and Apple already and although it has benefits when it comes to distributing commercial software (although Steam seems to be in a better position to do that) it also has cons we don’t want or need when it comes to distributing free software.
Flatpak solves the same problems (albeit not the commercial aspects) without these cons. With Flatpak you can point to any repository you want. Anyone can create a repository. Take Flathub for instance.. it’s handy, but it’s not central. If tomorrow it disappears or if what it does becomes unacceptable, it’s no big deal.. editors can ship on any repository, including their own, and users and distributions can point the client anywhere they want. That flexibility is key.
If after Mint 19 we want to ship Cinnamon 4.0 to Mint 18 users we can make a flatpak repository and ship it in there. We can also ask Flathub to ship it for us, but the key here is: We don’t have to. We can use Flatpak with or without Flahub.
Imagine if APT could only point to Debian and whenever we wanted to add something we had to go through them. We’re able to maintain our own repositories, and people don’t have to go through us either, thanks to that flexibility they can make their own 3rd party repositories and their own PPA. We’ve gotten used to that flexibility and we’re quite fond of it.
Snap might evolve and become more flexible in the future. At the moment it lacks repository management and that’s really important if it wants to position itself as a solution for everybody.
From a development point of view, we’ve had very good communications with both the Snap and Flatpak development teams, they look eager to help so I’m quite confident we’ll see both solutions evolve going forward.
“Flatpak apps are updated automatically when you log in”
sir, that removes user control. very scary.
===
I do understand that many Linux Mint users want automatic updates, and are willing to risk all for that “convenience factor”
thanks
You can disable it. It’s also worth mentioning that flatpaks run in isolation and do not impact the operating system… that puts regressions into perspective.
“You can disable it”.
So we have to opt out?
Not very nice of you in my opinion.
I personally don’t like to spend time searching through settings so I turn off thing that should’ve been off from the beginning.
It seems like and abuse of the “power of the default” and a little less control Peter said.
Updating automatically doesn’t make the boot even slower?
No it doesn’t affect boot time or login time.
If this wasn’t on by default we’d be talking about a security issue.
Defaults are decided with everybody in mind, you’re expressing a personal preference on something you know very little about.
I wouldn’t describe launching “Startup Programs” to manage things that launch at startup “spending time searching through settings”.
Just a quick additional note.
I’ll be completely honest here, the implementation of Flatpak happened out of the blue. We planned to look into Snap and Flatpak but there was never a plan to implement support for it in Linux Mint 18.3. This was supposed to come for Linux Mint 19.
We were invited by Canonical to attend discussions about Snap and we’re yet to ask support for repository management. So although this appears as a blocker for us and the scope being Mint 19, to this day this hasn’t been requested and it hasn’t been refused. If this was to be implemented we would look into Snap again.
When looking into Flatpak we found no red flags, no blockers whatsoever. The technology and design were fun and so I personally worked on that a little more than I had planned to. We actually had a project called “desktop search” on the roadmap (and that is moving towards Mint 19), but instead, this got implemented simply because I couldn’t stop working on it. Mind you, I’m delighted it’s ready in time for 18.3.. because down the line it allows us to backport flatpak to 18.3 users in the future.
Thank you for explanation. Quite some time ago i came across this information:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/24/howto-host-your-own-snap-store/
Wouldn’t this be solution to this particular issue?
Anyway, for time being what i would appreciate is integration of snapped apps into LM so they behave (menus integration, confinement etc.) and don’t look out of place visually.
In any case it is not big deal (till i come across some app that does have snap but not flatpak version :D) and you are are doing awesome job as it is.
Thanks
Hi,
Well the client doesn’t have repository management.. it only points to a single store. You can see in this tutorial that an environment variable has to be set to force it to point elsewhere. We could do even better, we could download the source code for snapd, patch it to point where we want and it’s job done. The problem with that is that we’re the only ones pointing to our store.. so what’s the point of having a store then? That might work locally for a company or so, but such a store would never thrive/succeed if people can’t “add” it to the other stores they already point to. And editors won’t ship there, they’ll ship through/via the Ubuntu Store instead. So this is a clear example of something that is possible from a technical point of view, but futile in practice.
https://github.com/noise/snapstore seems to indicate that solution also no longer works. Still, you can always hack the code.. but again, there’s no point to it. The idea is for editors to have a choice to publish themselves or via other stores (plural) and for users/distros to point to what they see fit. If the Ubuntu Store is always in the middle and there’s no room for anything else, that’s an issue.
Hi Clem and team,
With Redshift being installed by default for 18.3, how will that effect those who operate a strict colour managed workflow?
For example, I spend a great amount of time carefully calibrating and profiling all displays with a colorimeter for accurate colour photographic and CGI design work, any hue change would be detrimental .
Thank you for your time, Mint development work, and great Blog redesign.
Hi Dave,
It will be installed by default but it will not run automatically unless you ask it to. And if you decide you don’t like it you’ll of course be able to remove it.
Personally I’d like to see you offer XFCE as the alternative desktop for LMDE. Lots of slower machines struggle with Cinnamon.
I second that suggestion!
What a good idea. I’d vote for that.
I agree. Xfce is often a good choice for old hardware.
You said: “in case Ubuntu ever disappeared” .. something you’re not telling us about Ubuntu’s future?
As for dropping KDE, I won’t miss it. I’ve tried it many times over the years, and I just don’t get along with it. Cinnamon is the one for me!
Another distro bites the dust. Mint KDE was far and away the best KDE distro out there, in that it was stable, easily updateable (Thanks Debian!) and just worked out of the box. Support was good. Apps & KDE were up-to-date, but not hanging on the bleeding edge. It was the best. And it will soon be gone. The multiple users I have encouraged and multiple computers I support will have to start looking for a new distribution home. And frankly the pickings are slim. Want a Debian based KDE distro? This was your best choice. Kubuntu was a distant second, and it always feels like more of a second class citizen than KDE ever did here. This stinks.
I appreciate your giving us (your users) plenty of warning. It’s nice to know I’ve got more than a couple of weeks to move multiple systems. I’m just very frustrated because I thought I’d found a base I could build on.
Now I see myself as a lucky guy with only one friend encouraged. And only as a secondary OS after W7 to browse and e-mail if something. Another luck of mine is fedora kde staying always ready to use. Though I spent about a year to make almost everything there to run it my way, it’s not Mint 🙂
So MS has won another tactical advantage again, and quite a significant one…
But who to blame first are the so called ‘generation next’ developers of kde, I think. Their peevish attitude, absolute ignorance that I’ve seen in their blogs look having no a precedent in the industry.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel. I haven’t tried Kubuntu in a really long time, because I found that Mint KDE just polished it and made sure the edges were smooth. I’m going to miss the update manager in particular unless there is some way to install it on Kubuntu, and some of the new tools like MintReport sound really nice to have.
I tried Manjaro, but after I while I managed to bork the install trying to get updates installed. Since I was only testing it didn’t matter too much, but it would have been a pain on my day to day system, and I’m not sure I could ever explain how to keep the system up-to-date to my mom whereas it’s simple w/ Mint KDE.
You want KDE Neon. In fact, KDE Neon ought to be mentioned in the OP as an alternative choice for Mint KDE refugees, rather than something like Arch or OpenSUSE which are both great but are very different beasts from other branches of the Linux family tree than Mint.
And I have a feeling that I should not use KDE Neon for production. Only for fun, and to compare features and bugs. I still update Neon with terminal – update, upgrade of apt command. Because KDE Discover of Neon do not do it properly sometimes.
I wouldn’t recommend it to the ordinary users. It’s still only a demo for me.
Mint Update is buggy too since a couple of months. I have switched to KDE Neon and it runs a bit faster than Mint KDE. It’s true, Discover is not as refined as the Mint Package manager but this is just a minor thing.
Neon runs smooth and fast, I use the version based on Ubuntu stable.
I still love Mint but only for Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce.
Thanks Clem. Here is a vote of confidence in your leadership.
Hi mint team,
Could you consider revamping the homepage of linux mint ? Also, removing advertisements from the site (at least from the homepage) will be a nice idea.Linux mint is getting so popular and it is not a good idea to fill the main page of a professional operating system with ads.
They need to cover operating cost and other stuff. Hence, ads.
Do you plan to release your XApps as Flatpak in near future? Your reasons to integrate Flatpak in Mint also apply to other platforms.
Hi Bard,
Yes, it’s a possibility. This was implemented quite late in the 18.3 cycle but we’re delighted to see it going in, because it’s a door open to allow us to backport future apps into 18.3 in the future.
Sad to read that Linux Mint is no longer a usable distribution for me, looks like I’ll be going back to Kubuntu then.
Seriously KDE Mint was the distro I recommended to my friends to try Linux, now Mint is not even on the radar.
“Seriously KDE Mint was the distro I recommended to my friends to try Linux” [2].
🙁
RAID support soon?
Clem and team, thanks for all the hard work. Enjoy Mint Cinnamon on all my computers. On my laptop, the one issue that annoys me the most is the touchpad performance. Even with “disable when typing” set to on and sensitivity set to the lowest point, the touchpad, when brushed during typing, causes the cursor to jump and change focus on the desktop. Disabling the touchpad is sort of a solution, until I boot up and don’t have my mouse with me. The temporary solution is adding the ppa for Touchpad-Indicator and installing that program. This works, but I don’t know that it will work in Mint 19 as it doesn’t seem to be in active development.
Can you integrate a solution into the touchpad hardware settings to “disable touchpad when USB mouse is plugged in”?
Alec, I’ve noticed this too. I just leave the touchpad disabled, and then if/when I’m without an external mouse for whatever reason I re-enable it using the keyboard (there are tonnes of ways you can set this up, but the easiest thing to do is just to use the standard keyboard navigation – hit Super/Win to open the menu, filter the “Mouse and Touchpad” option from the menu, hit enter, and then navigate the dialogue using tab and space to select/toggle — although the lack of a focus indicator of the toggle switches does make this harder than it ought to be, it’s not too hard).
Would disabling tap to click help? Also, is syndaemon installed and running?
Disabling tap to click doesn’t seem to help.
Thanks, Wilo. Just tried the keyboard method and it works. Depending on the theme running, it can be difficult to see which controls have the focus, but with a little squinting I was able to toggle the touch pad on and off with the keyboard.
Hi Alec,
We’ve added support for Libinput in Cinnamon 3.6 and we’ll ship with it going forward. This should help (I’m assuming you’re using the synaptics driver at the moment).
I heard Ubuntu will abandon the 32 bits OSes after their version 17.10. Will it be the same on Mint?.
I think also that abandoning Mate on LMDE3 is probably not that good and will push people out as it is a lightweight DE, capable of running decently where Cinnamon is clearly paining. IMHO, the 1st Linux distro should keep Cinnamon && Mate as well as Mate at least in 32 bits versions for the not so young PCs which are still running well, in the country I am living in, very few people will throw off their 2008-2010 PCs…
Hi JF,
The decision taken by Ubuntu makes sense.. i386 is dying and the vast majority of hardware is able to run amd64 these days. Is it too early though? I don’t know. In any case, that decision doesn’t affect us.
Yes it is too early.
believe it or not in my community many local stores use Linux Mint Mate and LMDE Mate as a front end for their cash register type checkout programs that and print receipt and make logs for the taxing agencies.
They just don’t have the hardware required.
Hi Clem
I think it is too early. The 64-bits is vary accessible in EU, USA and Japan, but numbers of emerging countries use massively 32-bits systems out of the main cities. One of the Linux argumentation was to “keep up and running” old systems. The whole world is not yet ready for this transition. Here (in Peru, but I know by experience it is the same in many other places), the old computers will be thrown out only when being unrepairable.
First – thanks for Mint!!!! I think 18.3 sounds pretty great and I can’t wait to upgrade to it.
Second – while I have been using XFCE since 2008, I admit that I do like Kdenlive for video editing. With the exit of KDE from the Mint distro lineup, will that mean that KDE apps will also be unavailable?
Oh no, not at all. Ok hold on here 🙂
Nothing is changed for other editions. You’ll still have access to the same packages, so you’ll still be able to install KDE apps. If you wanted, you could even install KDE itself.
Now, when it comes to KDE apps, they require a lot of libs and because Qt (I made sure to spell it right this time.. so I don’t get corrected again) is evolving so fast they’re not always backward compatible, so it can be hard to get access to new versions. This is where Flatpak comes handy. I heard Flathub was working on a KDE runtime, and just searching the web look at this: https://github.com/KDE/flatpak-kde-applications.
I’d say we’re likely to see KDE apps available in Flatpaks going forward. That basically will make it possible not only to run KDE apps without installing Qt/KDE libs on the OS, but also to gain access to very recent KDE apps which wouldn’t otherwise be retro-compatible.
That is great news, and the answer I was hoping for!
I’m going to have to check out Flatpak, it looks interesting.
No! Please no! I use both KDE and Mate desktops! Don’t drop support for that! What will happen to my main laptop that uses Linux Mint KDE? I would actually like the project to grow and improve KDE compatibility and KDE programs instead! If you can’t I don’t mind not getting all the benefits from Xapps (which I use in my Mate desktop PC ) at least just keep KDE around even if it’s not as top notch quality as the other versions, you can warn users about that but please don’t turn your back on us KDE users!
I am looking forward to LM18.3, Flatpack implementation looks great.
One of the issues I have in LM18.2 is that nemo does not show my iphone (iOS11.0.3) cam pictures.
Is there any way to navigate/use NFS shares in nemo apart from using the console to mount them?
More cosmetical attention/refinements, new/better window effects would be a plus.
What is important is that LM Cinnamon always improves, offering a mature and easy to use distribution.
Thank you for the hard and smart work!
For a long time I used Linux Mint. Thanks for that! Cinnamon never really pleased me. I used MATE for a while, but KDE plasma is the best desktop for me. From my point of view, it makes no sense to install LM KDE 18.3. The problem would only be postponed. Better to switch to another distribution immediately!
Bye LM!
“There are rose-growers who care more about aphids than roses.”
Excuse my ignorance on this but, why is the KDE version burdening you so much?
The KDE is maintained/updated by other people/community.
Is the integration to your distribution that much on an ordeal/hassle ?
Again, forgive my ignorance on the matter as I am not a software developer.
PS. 1
Thank you for your efforts.
I have have very much enjoyed in the fruits of your labor the last years.
PS. 2
KDE has the Konsole Terminal ( imho the best terminal emulator EVER).
Other DEs have …….. Nothing even approaching that level. I guess I have to live with Kubuntu from now on.
Hi Steven,
It doesn’t take “that” much time or resources but the expectation is lower than for other editions. When we see something that isn’t ideal in Cinnamon, MATE or Xfce we can fix it, we can develop it, we can adapt it. More and more with KDE, we’ve acknowledged the fact that this was drastically different, that it didn’t fit with what we do, and so we started shipping it as is and without touching it, even when it was problematic. In our last release you might have noticed the switch to SDDM. It’s not something we enjoy all that much, but it just fits in with Plasma upstream and so it works better than trying to make Slick work with it, and we’re not sure we want to spend resources to go against the current if that makes sense.
It’s hard to explain…
Let me illustrate this a different way, so you can see what I mean.
We stopped shipping an LXDE edition years ago.
Well, if we didn’t have to test it… and say we didn’t care how well it worked or how polished and well assembled it was… assuming all that, we could ship an any edition without much hassle. It wouldn’t take much time or resources away from us. We could even have an ISO built daily and automatically.
The reality though is that:
– We don’t want to ship something we didn’t test
– We don’t want to ship something we’re not happy with
– We don’t want to ship something anybody else can ship
– We don’t want to attract an audience which cares about something we don’t care enough about
I think it’s important for us to love what we do and to be in sync with our user base. I look at what we’re developing, the new features we’re working on and I can’t wait for us to do more. There are plenty of desktop environments out there and plenty of combinations of software selections we could experiment with.. but throwing DEs and packages into an ISO and shipping as many varieties as we can isn’t exciting and eventually it’s only going to disappoint.
Where KDE is costly isn’t to put it up together, it’s that everything we do has to work there and every time we release it there’s a compromise made. Our implementation of KDE is what we call “Vanilla”. We do the best we can with what’s coming from upstream and we ship it as is. We’re lucky Kubuntu does such a good job at packaging it. It isn’t such a bad thing and I know many of you enjoy it. It’s what most distributions do, they distribute. We’ve been used to go the extra mile though and this is a frustrating experience.
So long story short, shipping a KDE edition isn’t much work at all. Many distributions do so even in a fully automated way. Making sure it’s great is difficult and especially in the case of KDE, because it’s harder and because we can’t achieve the same level of integration and that’s really frustrating.
I’m using linuxmint-18.2-LXDE from Linux Mint Deutsch . And I’m very happy with . I know that it’s unofficial but it’s Mint with LXDE and works fine . Is it possible the same with KDE at next Mint?
Clem, I think one thing that might help to ease KDE users’ pain would be to provide out-of-the-box compatibility with Dolphin. Last time I tried Dolphin in Cinnamon, no icons appeared.
I think you’re doing it right. Cinnamon is the desktop that we want to see from you until forever and xfce is good for someone who is trying to do something different. I’m not sure about Ubuntu fall scenario but I like LMDE too.
Your version of KDE has been a class act, from the artwork to the applications Mint provides. I will be sorry to see it go.
Hi,
The artwork is only a color variation of upstream KDE and the icon theme is 100% vanilla (called Breeze). It’s really hard to theme KDE nicely and properly, luckily it looks very nice by default 🙂
As much as I have enjoyed the KDE version of Mint I am sad to see it go. I agree that with Plasma 5 the development timeline is quite different from what we were accustomed to. I started “toying” with KDE’s “not a distro” distro and see it as the replacement for my Mint KDE.
Thanks for the hard work done by all of Mint’s staff and developers.
I changed the source of LM18.2 to LM18.3, I performed the update, restart and I noticed in the System Settings -> Users and Groups is asking for password but after I type it in nothing happens.
Just for consistency would be better to use the same wording for the tabs: Applets->Download, Extensions->Download, Desklets->Download, Themes->Add/Remove
Oh Magni… you’re not supposed to use 18.3 just yet, it’s not ready.
Can you type “sudo cinnamon-settings-users” and see if you can spot any errors?
Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
(cinnamon-settings-users.py:2765): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_settings_get_for_screen: assertion ‘GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)’ failed
/usr/share/cinnamon/cinnamon-settings-users/cinnamon-settings-users.py:429: Warning: g_object_get_qdata: assertion ‘G_IS_OBJECT (object)’ failed
self.builder.add_from_file(“/usr/share/cinnamon/cinnamon-settings-users/cinnamon-settings-users.ui”)
Can you run other graphical apps with sudo? It looks like it can’t connect to the display.
I would say that all the other (driver manager, firewall, login window, software sources) are running well.
Interesting…
In the last years of the Linux world, it seems that the things which became mature must be killed.
With Cinnamon I experienced more crash, than other DE (I have Nvidia graphic card).
I was waiting for KDE edition, but now…
So Sad…
Flo, I wouldn’t call using a PPA to catch up with something that wasn’t full featured on the LTS and isn’t retro-compatible “mature”.
Plasma is fantastic, but we’re looking at a very rapid pace of development here.
Compare it to other DEs. What’s really mature here is MATE, which banks on years of stable GNOME 2 release. Or even more than MATE, Xfce which has evolved incrementally and without incidents or breaks from the past.
Yes.
You right. Mate is mature, (maybe some missing feature.) same XFCE which I use on a station.
In my opinion, if Mint Team will develop it’s own DE without depending on Gnome, KDE Or XFCE, with their own code, maybe the full goal will be targeted. LMDE is stable, rock solid, but not up to date in features. I was hoping that LMDE it will be main platform.
Mint Team must not depend by others. Make your way, BE THE LEADERS.
Best Regards.
Carl mentioned captive portals yesterday (October 25, 2017 at 7:24 pm), but the conversation got derailed. Could I raise it again? This is important for me, as I use a laptop at several locations on my university campus and in cafes, and in the past I’ve often had trouble getting a WiFi connection. My phone is much better! On Linux, I’ve often had to point my browser at 1.1.1.1 explicitly, and sometimes that has helped. Etc. etc. Any improvements coming down the pike on this issue? I see that network-manager is at 1.2.6 (xenial-updates); at the lkundrak ppa it’s at 1.9 (https://launchpad.net/~lkundrak/+archive/ubuntu/network-manager?field.series_filter=xenial).
Okay so how do we know that you won’t get tired of working on Mate or Xfce versions? How do we know you won’t fall completely in love with working only on Cinnamon? For some of us, Cinnamon is crappy. I mean it is stiff feeling and buggy like Gnome 3 and there are not many choices to change things like we can in Mate and Xfce. I have never been real fond of KDE, but still your abandoning it and its users feels very unsafe for us that have given several donations and have relied on Linux Mint for work and pleasure. Yes, I’m grown up enough to know nothing is forever, but somehow this is depressing.
It’s already been mentioned, but Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce all use the same GTK framework so with the X-Apps technology developed under Linux Mint, a single application can be developed that works across all three with minimal extra effort over and above developing for a single desktop environment whereas conversely KDE uses the Qt framework and so would be a totally separate development. Additionally MATE and XFCE even moreso are based on very stable technologies whereas the KDE software stack was rapidly evolving making it harder to keep up with.
Yes and it goes further than that. If we see an area of improvement, we can develop both Cinnamon and MATE to adapt to it and although we don’t develop Xfce directly, its code and design is very simple and very modular so it’s a DE which is very easy to patch.
You’re conveying the idea of communities within the community and conflicting interests. We’ve put a lot of efforts into developing solutions, whether it’s tools, apps or libs which work and integrate in all three desktops, precisely so that the work we achieve benefits everybody. Look at the new features described here. There’s plenty of new and exciting developments, for all users of Linux Mint, no matter the DE they use, and despite the fact that MATE and Xfce are feature-complete (which is a good thing in terms of stability).
It’s always depressing to see something go and trust me it’s not very nice for us either.
I’ll be honest with you Bill, I’ll grow tired of reading things that hurt before I grow tired on working on anything technical. Donations don’t help with going through that. That’s what “crappy”. I understand you’re disappointed. If this didn’t make a lot of sense for us and if it wasn’t a good move for our project we wouldn’t do it and we’d continue as we did before. We’re not bringing sad news just for the pleasure of it.
Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction Clem, not meant to be hurtful. As I get older and watch friends and relatives and pets drop away, it just feels like loosing one more thing is too much. I guess I was just looking for assurance that Mate would be around for some time to come. On considering all you wrote here I will say that Flatpak looks very exciting. And thank you for all your technical work that you give us so freely.
Thanks Bill, no worries.
I’m in very similar situation of loosing, Bill. Looking for assurance of everything around and so on… Having the knee-jerking reactions all the time..
Yes, Flatpack looks very exciting. I have already a dream of using not only different apps but different widgets too. For example, it would be wonderful to have on Hot corner of Cinnamon the call to Application Dashboard widget of KDE.
And I’m going to install Cinnamon Mint again. I’m a good boy 🙂
Thanks VEG. 😉
You is a bad Clem! Please continue to support KDE. While I realise Cinnamon is always going to be your main focus, KDE is undoubtedly one of the finest desktop environments available today and is constantly improving. I fell in love with Linux Mint 7. It was Ubuntu done right and I have used it ever since. When Gnome 2 was abandoned, I admired your mission to create Cinnamon, but never really “clicked” with it. MATE was also an admirable effort, and I hope to find it more to my liking in the near future. Wanting to stay with Mint, I decided to upgrade my hardware and go with Mint KDE. Since then I have (mostly) enjoyed every release. I know it doesn’t fit in well with your future plans, but if you don’t have to deviate too much from a standard KDE setup, why drop it? Sorry for the rant.. if ya gotta ditch it then ya gotta ditch it! I will though, miss this fantastic ride. I really don’t want to leave Mint, but I’m going to have to stick with KDE. Hope you reconsider. Either way, I wish you the best of luck with future endeavours.
PLEASE KEEP KDE!!!!!
Hi Paul,
I’m sorry. And you’re right, KDE is a great DE. I’m glad you love it, I’m glad you love Mint and I’m sorry you can’t continue to enjoy them together.
As long as XFCE is supported, I’m happy. 🙂
FWIW, I installed Xubuntu 17.10 in another partition, and Mintstick (1.3.4, latest version) didn’t work.
Finally found out I needed to manually install python-gi to get it working.
Just switched back to Linut Mint 18.2 XFCE…
This update pleases me a lot! I’m happy Redshift will be included by default, it’s a great utility.
Has Devuan been considered, instead of Debian, for LMDE?
https://devuan.org/
Thank you
Hi Ovari,
Devuan is proof that a community can react, gather and achieve great things. It reminds me of MATE and Cinnamon and I’ve got a lot of respect for it.
That said, there’s no reason to base LMDE on Devuan right now. I see five reasons not to do so already (there might be more):
– LMDE is a fallback and so although we would only ever release something that works well, its primary goal is to be a proof of concept and to minimize the work that would be necessary if we had to switch to it. As such, it doesn’t need to be exactly what it would be, if/when that happens and it doesn’t need to have “all” the features Linux Mint has. The work involved in considering/switching to Devuan could be done then (a lot of development would have to happen to port some Ubuntu specific components over as well) and doesn’t need to happen right now.
– Some of the things we don’t like about Debian (and I won’t go through them here, because this isn’t my intention to criticize them and the issues you might have with Debian as a user are quite different than the ones we might have as a derivative) aren’t questioned by Devuan.
– From a technical point of view Systemd works very well for us. From a philosophical point of view we don’t see an issue with it, at least not the way Devuan does.
– Although all our editions support ConsoleKit (this is the case of all DEs, I would need to check the situation with LightDM/Slick but I would expect it to work or to be easy to port) moving away from Systemd would result in a loss of features.
– Pretty much everybody among the major distributions moved to Systemd. Some projects like Mint, Ubuntu, GNOME develop a lot and some projects like Fedora or Arch are very active when it comes to testing and we receive a lot of feedback from them. They all use Systemd. Moving away from it means isolating ourselves, being in the dark when it comes to feedback and suffering bugs nobody else has. This affects crucial components such as session management, services, power, hardware events.. well you know how widespread systemd is.
For those looking for other Distros with KDE, don’t forget PCLinuxOS. They have a very polished, stable version, and it does not include Systemd, if that’s an issue for you. I know Clem has spoken highly of Texstar’s efforts in the past, he does great work there.
That is irrelevant. For all the people wanting systemd there is an equal amount of people not wanting systemd and neither needing it either. The problem is when distributions move towards systemd and give users no choice. That has always been a massive problem in the Linux ecosystem ever since.
Guys, first of all, thank you for this great project and effort.
Second, I would like to ask you to include a built in L2TP / IPsec VPN client. This is extremely important and such a PAIN to setup manually. PPTP is fundamentally broken, and OpenVPN is not supported by many legacy services and equipment.
Thank you.
Sounds really exciting and the upgrades are coming.
The option to access Google Drive straightened from Nemo is really a relief, but what about support for Caja? Mate users are also interested in GNOME Online Accounts, and we would be very happy if you could do the same for us.
Waiting for the next release, and thank you for everything.
I’ve read the answers of Clem to the users and must say Thank you, Clem! once more. Summer 2015, when Clem did such a magic of implementing kde5, it was wonderful. It was the first usable Plasma 5 distro among all I had tested in panic after I saw new Kubuntu then. And Clem did it against all odds. I am an admirer of kde but must say kde has been such pain since 2014 that… I have no words. Even today – their already 11th build – system tray is not properly working for all applications, auto-hiding of the panels doesn’t always work…
And I see it as – why has Clem to save and keep the KDE desktop afloat when the KDE developers themselves do not do it? Let them losers make their failure survive.
Yes, KDE’s Application dashboard widget is a masterpiece, and other features too. I love KDE and do not stop using it. But as a system, it’s a failure, IMHO. They mess their jewels with crap. Especially if to compare 5 with KDE4, unfortunately unfinished, in only two steps lack to perfection.
Let’s wait till a new kde developing team and Plasma 6 🙂
Hold on, Clem! Please do not read things that hurts you.
True. The effort was bigger.
So, I think Mint Team could merge all the best feature, not to work for compatibility of apps with every DE, but to work for compatibility with hardware.
What about of an adaptable (intelligent) DE, depending on the power of the computer? For example, some graphic features (animation), to be activated by default, when a powerful computer or hardware upgrade is detected. (Perhaps I talk about Science Fiction).
That would hurt me deeply if I was a KDE dev. I really don’t see the need to criticize people’s work like that.
Don’t take in the bad sense.
The problem is that so many resources and time is wasted, because peoples aren’t unified. Diversity is a good thing, but not so good for productivity. Finding some suitable for me and my hardware is painful because i have not too much time. Something is working in some release and in next release or edition, there are too much trouble.
Yes, I beg your pardon, and the kde developing team pardon too. It’s been very bad from me to make them hurt, or anybody around, even if something hurts me personally. I sincerely apologize for this.
They are trying their best after all. And it deserves respect from me, and other users.
I have no any right to use rude words even if I feel KDE of being ‘too’ mine as a DE, quite close to the heart.
And actually, that’s the kde team who makes this gift for me. Thanks them for KDE.
Thanks VEGalin.
Thank you for a lesson. I really lost the ground then.
I appreciate your help. Your tact is amazing.
Regarding Snap packages: They already work in Mint 18.2. sudo apt install snapd will install the necessary packages from the Ubuntu repos. sudo snap install -package-name- will install the snap package. Sometime a log-off/log-on is required for the new package to show up in the menu. I have found that a snapped program takes much longer to load than the unsnapped version. I’m sure this is because a snapped program is super compressed.
What doesn’t work in Mint 18.2 is Snapcraft. It will install, but errors out when trying to build a snap package from the .yaml file. Will support for Snapcraft be coming in 18.3? I would think that if it can be done in Ubuntu 16.04 it can be done in Mint 18.x.
My computer is on an Atom processor.
I tried to work on Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Open Suse, but the computer brakes and hangs.
Only with LinuxMint Cinnamon the computer works.
Continue in the same direction, in the direction of stability and reliability.
Thank you so much for your work!
A very old bug in Mint with WiFI : https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1710575
Could you add the good device in Linux Mint to resolv it ?
default blog layout results in this:
http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4888/y2ykqsg6_png.htm
firefox, chromium, vivaldi — all the same, so no bug, but your intended design. really?
Dear Mint Developers,
I would like to thank you for your awesome kde releases in the past.
It was pleasure to use Mint KDE editions for years.
As you mentioned KDE is a different and better (at least for me) Desktop Manager then Cinnamon or others.
See you again when you decide to release new KDE editions.
Thanks and Kind Regards to all of you.
Thanks Darkstar,
You’re very welcome.
I’m sad to see KDE go, even though i’m not a KDE user.
Unfortuantely i don’t think there’s any distro out there that is able to make KDE some justice.
My hope was that Mint was going to be the distro to achieve that.
But given that KDE was never a first class citizen with Mint, i’m not really surprised to see it go. And if it benefits the quality of the rest of the Mint offerings i can’t really complain.
Hey there! It’s exciting to see that flatpak will now be preinstalled. My personal view is that flatpak handles gui application better then snap. But when it comes to terminal applications snap is the clear winner, I personally use it for `micro`, `http`, and `asciinema`. Will snap be installed by default as well?
Hi Noah,
No.
I use Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon on an Laptop.
What is a little confusing from my point of view is that the Battery Symbol is in red when the laptop is loading or on the power net. Whould it be possible to have it in green if the battery is fully loaded?
The “shield with green hook” appears after start-up even the laptop is not connected with the internet and there could be no check for updates done. Wouldǹt it be more clear to have an symbol showing that ubdates couldn be checked (“shield with redt cross”) instead if the laptop has no connection to the internet?
The battery symbol changes colour as the battery discharges, from Cinnamon 3.4 onwards. It can show ‘warning’ or ‘error’ colour, and this can be themed. The default is yellow and red. ‘Warning’ colour is shown when there is 20% or less, ‘Error’ colour when 5% or less.
Sorry, I do not know why I have written 17.2 in the comment above.
I have 18.2 and this means Cinnamon 3.4?
I am wondering why I get an red battery symbol when the Laptos is charging and thebattery should be full?
The other question is on the check for updates. There I everytime get an shield with green hook” after start up even the Laptop could not connect to the internet because of an problem with the cable connection.
The settlement you take, to focus on the projects that actually work, I stand one hundred percent behind. It was very wise of you. Thank you for a wonderful great distro.
Looking forward to 18.3!
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.2 64-bit:
1. It is necessary to have an option to Enable/Disable the Auto-Login in Menu->Administration->Login Window.
2. Bug: when applying a Right-To-Left language (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc), in Menu->Preferences->Languages, sometimes the Cinnamon Menu stays in the left side of the screen (in this case there is no problem since all menus are still in the left side; yet it might be the wrong behavior…);
while sometimes the Cinnamon Menu moves to the right side of the screen (which is how it probably should work – all menus are switching from left to right): in this case the Main Cinnamon Menu not only switches from left to right – it also switches Up and Down (which is a bug…).
Thank you for all the hard work. There is on issue that is really annoying and it is a constant thing. When using the Nvidia drivers you can scale the screen area to fit. You could also do this with AMD when the drivers were supported. Also the Intel graphics can be scaled in Windows. However there is no way to easily scale the screen area when it doesn’t fit when using either a ATI/AMD or Intel graphics solution. Would it be possible at all to implement something to make it easier like a click and drag option for the screen area. I realize this is probably an Xorg thing.
Kudos for integrating redshift! Discovered this feature since windows released night light, wanted it on linux too.
I would like it more if you guys supported both Flatpak and Snap but that’s alright if Flatpak has everything Snap and Repository has. 🙂
Some great news! I first started my Linux journey with Mint 13 Maya KDE and switched over to Cinnamon later so this post is bit nostalgic for me :))
Great news and thanks for troubleshooting tool – had suggested about a similar thing in Community a while ago! Don’t mind me asking this – but are the Community site / ideas being looked at by team periodically?
https://community.linuxmint.com/idea/view/3844
I would like to make a donation but I see that the only way is through the Pay Pal. I currently live in Turkey and Pay Pal has stopped its activities here. Is there another way to donate to Linux Mint?
Hi Clem,
Popped on IRC to ask the following, didn’t see you, so asking here…
– VirtualBox Guest Additions (3 files)
Have you decided which version of Guest Additions (GA) will be shipped with Mint, 5.1.30, other?
Is the general consensus to continue supplying GA with Mint, or would it help prevent issues supplying Mint without GA (see next paragraph)?
In case you receive bug reports from early VirtualBox 5.2.0 adopters. Currently, there’s a black screen issue after installing 5.2.0 GA, I’ve read this is due to a conflict with the version of GA supplied with Mint, removing the supplied files, then installing 5.2.0 GA should fix the issue.
– Mesa
17.2?
– Firefox
Thoughts on enabling the following by default to prevent diagonal tearing?
layers.acceleration.force-enabled true
After testing on Intel and NVIDIA, above setting works better than ‘gfx.xrender.enabled true’ which can produce graphical artefacts while scrolling on Intel GPUs
Many thanks
Follow-up to my own post…
Having tested VirtualBox 5.2.0 with latests version of Guest Additions (5.2.1-118918), and following advice from vbox team on their forum to remove Mint supplied GA files, before installing above mentioned GA didn’t make any difference, and still results in a black screen with high CPU usage.
Probably best for users to stay with VirtualBox 5.1.30 until bugs are ironed out.
Hi
For years I used Linux Mint exclusive on my various PCs. Lately I bought a Chromebook because it was so cheap. What helps Chrome OS big time is the option to install Android Apps. Maybe Mint could consider integrating the anbox project nicely in Mint.
Mint would be the first Distribution capable of running Androidapps, just imagine the good PR you would get.
i am a big fan and long time on and off user of Mint, since like the earliest release from what i recall. But i haven’t been using it lately because all the desktop environment installs available ( including KDE, up through next release ) feature a “start menu” type interface popularized in 1995 or before that with the old Apple menu, and before that I don’t even know when it was first Introduced. But I actually prefer GNOME’s current interface. Is it still problematic, as I have read in the past, to install GNOME in Mint? If not, which base Installation of Mint would be best to install GNOME into? (I’m taking wild guess it would be Xfce.) I imagine you won’t be creating a Mint GNOME edition; if that were available I’d download it today! I’ve used Korora which is a great distro derived from Fedora, but I also like to have a Debian/Ubuntu based distro. Ubuntu GNOME is over, Ubuntu’s implementation of
GNOME now in their main edition seems quite poor to me, and anyway Mint has always been my favorite because it offers so much more of a complete solution for me than any other distro. Either way, thanks to the Mint team for all your great work.
Library Eye, you can always open the Software Center and install Gnome-Shell from there. I just did it as a test and it looks pretty good. I’m not a big fan of gnome shell, but it seems to run well. It is version 3.18 as it is pulling from the 16.04 repos. I would imagine that when Mint 19 comes out you can install at least Gnome shell 3.26.
Great. Thanks for reply Alec. I’d read some old posts advising against it. I’ll install Mint (may wait for 19) either Cinnamon or XFCE on my rather old Macbook and once I get fan going right ( Linux seems to run hot on it, in previous attempts ) and test it out, I will try Gnome-Shell. In meantime, I have latest Mint Cinnamon on my newer, non-Apple laptop so I’ll install from Software Center soon and report back on how it goes.
My Reprise
As comments now are winding down,
(It won’t be very long …)
I thought it wise
To reprise
These points, as in a song.
(I hope you like it)
Adagio for LMDE3-MATE in G(whiz) Minor
[for https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418 , choir, & orchestra]
The “Singers” The “Lyrics”
Jason Hsu – #comment-137468
“Given that MATE is lighter than Cinnamon and given that
LMDE is the answer for those wanting a lighter and faster
Linux Mint, LMDE with MATE is the best edition of Linux
Mint for old computers.”
Wilo – #comment-137488
“LMDE’s audience is smaller because it receives less
development, it’s undersold … I can’t help thinking that
if LMDE got the same dev love that the “main” version
gets, it would be better still.”
Crispin – #comment-137550
“Eine Volk, eine distro, eine DE… for that, we have MS.
Leave my MATE live, it’s more stable and faster then ANY
Cinnamon!”
Horacio – #comment-137514
“LMDE 3 [32-bit] will become more important … Debian will
be the … option for older hardware. LMDE/Mate combo runs
fast in powerfull pentium machines…”
Jonathan B. Horen – #comment-137548
“… Cinnamon is too heavy for my older (32-bit) hardware.
… I will not be sanguine about LMDE3 offering (only?) the
Cinnamon desktop …”
Crispin – #comment-137551
“2nd that. MATE is lighter, faster, more stable then
Cinnamon. Perfect for LMDE3. If … ‘Xapp project allows us
[LM Team] to improve the Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce editions
all at once and without efforts’ … then I hope to see
LMDE Mate, in time.”
John H. – #comment-137549
“… no doubt that millions of older, fully functional
computers worldwide could benefit from the LMDE-with-MATE
combination — reason enough … to promote MATE into the
LMDE 3 era. … There is another … reason not to abandon
MATE for LMDE 3: Elegance. … your ‘stable, robust,
traditional’ MATE is the very model of classic elegance in
a desktop environment. To eliminate it from the (admittedly)
strategically important LMDE 3 platform would be to diminish
the very soul of Linux Mint. … please! — don’t abandon
MATE for LMDE 3!”
Jonathan B. Horen – #comment-137560
“Well said!”
Pat Huff – #comment-137587
“May I add my ‘please’ too? …”
bill skiles – #comment-137639
“I’ll 4th that”
meequz – #comment-137564
“Very sad to hear that MATE edition will be abandoned for
LMDE. Cinammon is so … unpredictable … Could we at
least hope that LMDE MATE comes back … ?”
Chris S – #comment-137571
“… when LMDE came along with Mate it won hands down
because of its light footprint and ease of setup and tweaks.
Abandoning Mate in LMDE3 would easily push our older group
and less technical oriented out the door. … going [down]
the road with out a Mate option for LMDE3 is one [decision]
that I can not understand. Simple, Fast, Solid … LMDE3
without Mate to me seems like a set back.”
bill skiles – #comment-137641
“here here [sic] …”
JF Duhamel – #comment-137608
“I think also that abandoning Mate on LMDE3 is probably not
that good and will push people out as it is a lightweight
DE, capable of running decently where Cinnamon is [not].”
Peter E – #comment-137616
“… in my community many local stores use Linux Mint Mate
and LMDE Mate as a front end for their cash register type
checkout programs that and print receipt and make logs for
the taxing agencies. They just don’t have the hardware
required [to run Cinnamon].”
JF Duhamel – #comment-137645
“One of the Linux argumentation was to “keep up and running”
old systems. The whole world is not yet ready for this
transition. Here (in Peru, but I know by experience … in
many other places), the old computers will be thrown out
only when being unrepairable.”
CHORUS:
“Don’t let this light fade away!
Don’t let us run out of faith.
Be the developers who say:
‘L-M-D-E-3!
With M-A-T-E!’
Then don’t let go …
… Adagio! …”
[Inspired by a Lara Fabian song. Search “Lara Fabian – Adagio” on YouTube. Here’s one of many links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKtNuLG5jAo ]
Hello, I have Linux Mint 18, ¿when will the libgcrypt package be updated? (I have version 1.6.5 that is vulnerable and old). Thank you
Did anyone proofread the new, ObDark blog theme?
The small subhead at the top is Gray on Black – no doubt there is other almost hidden text. Dumb, really dumb.
Viewing this page in Firefox 56 BTW.
Will you gradually start abandoning python 2? Its really painful to have multiple python versions installed.
Dropping KDE? I guess it’s time to wipe my Mint KDE system and replace it with something else – I’ve tried Cinnamon and Mate, but didn’t like them as much.
The problem here is that the Linux Mint team has not enough resources to support KDE.
I can understand it but I wonder why they are then based on debian – are the debian folks not supporting KDE either? What’s with this gnomification of the ecosystem anyway?
I suggest you try Debian KDE, with the Live ISO. https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/
Personally I much prefer Mate. Unfortunately I was unable to use LMDE Mate, but I found Debian Mate suits me much better.
Linux Mint needs to focus on their strengths. Mate and KDE are not on their list.
You finally gonna update to xorg 1.19.x? Have been waiting for you to do that for over half a year before I switch back to Mint.
It’s the only solution I have found for tearing issues with fullscreen videos.
I have tried so many different solutions that people have come out with to no avail. Xorg 1.19.x fixes it!
I mean, if you can link me to a fix for the screen tearing there is a 99% chance I tried it.
Manjaro! Ubuntu! Both brilliant since the are using 1.19.x. No screen tearing is amazingballs.
Linux mint cinnamon is the best Linux.
Absolutely right decision to focus all your attention on the development of Cinnamon.
Previously, I used the KDE, but the consumption of computer resources and the inconvenience of the menu (compared to Cinnamon) confirms that your team and your pursuit are on the right track.
We are looking forward to the update of Cinnamon 18.3
SUCCESSES!
KDE is the best desktop environment in terms of looks. i’m very sad to move to Kubuntu now 🙁
Good news that you decided to left KDE finally. IMO all efforts need to be directed to polishing Cinnamon. It’s nearly perfect in terms of usability, so let’s focus on bugfixes. Personally, I’m waiting bugfix for reboot instead of shutdown… Good luck!..
What is good news about abandoning the biggest DE on Linux please?
Lots of exciting improvements coming… thank you guys for your precious work, as always! To be honest, I don’t see the point in maintaining any other desktops than the Cinnamon. Mint is mostly about getting a usable user interface, and that user interface is Cinnamon. There are already alternatives for other desktops: Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Mate. There’s no point of wasting precious development resources to reinvent the wheel. You made the right decision, IMO. And you should probably drop the other desktops as well. 🙂
I have two questions.
1. Can I upgrade 18.2 to 18.3 (even to beta) now?
2. Where I can get the wordpress-theme of this blog? I like it.
just one question. Will the Linux Mint website have a new design soon?
I hope the xfce version will be on LMDE
Ditto!
I won’t need Timeshift. I do hope it will be easy to un-install…
HOLA COMUNIDAD MENTA.
REALMENTE HE ESTADO PROBANDO VARIOS SISTEMAS OPERATIVOS EN MI PC COMO DEEPIN Y UBUNTU STUDIO PORQUE ME LOS HAN RECOMENDADO MUCHO; PERO MINT ES LO MAS ELEGANTE Y ÁGIL QUE HE ENCONTRADO. ESTOY USANDO LA VERSIÓN MINT 18.2 CON XFCE X 64 BITS. LA VERDAD ES QUE NO HE PROBADO LOS DEMÁS ENTORNOS PARA OPINAR DE ELLOS PERO LOS PROBARE A VER QUE TAL. LES AGRADEZCO A LOS DESARROLLADORES DE MINT POR EL GRAN TRABAJO QUE HAN HECHO Y A LOS USUARIOS DE KDE LOS ACOMPAÑO EN SUS SENTIMIENTOS…
I think all wise choices.
In my experience, Xfce is the most stable. Cinnamon and Xfce should be enough in my eyes.
Oh please! So what about us dedicated MATE users?! I agree that Cinnamon is ‘sleek, modern & innovative’, but for me (and for other users like me) it’s much more important that an OS is ‘stable, robust & traditional’ – and this is MATE. I would migrate to Cinnamon only if forced by circumstances, never voluntarily.
Second that notion.
I think this is fantastic news! I was able to fully transition away from Windows because of Mint. When I was distro-hopping, I only looked at flagships. Re: Mint, I only looked at Cinnamon. It’s where the strongest effort is going to be and as a transitioning user, I needed the peace of mind related to long-term availability.
I’m happy that more time is going to be made available to Cinnamon. Also happy about the PIA support!!
On a side note… been using cryptomator for the last week. It creates an encrypted vault (either locally or online) that when encrypted, behaves like any other directory. It’s been performing pretty well and I feel much more comfortable having a folder or two that’s completely inaccessible even after I log into the system (until I’m ready to connect with it).
I wonder if you guys can find a way to incorporate this kind of technology, in an easy to use way, within a future release of Mint – or play around with Cryptomator to see how well it fits into use-cases – or **further ensure they continue to play well together**.
Cryptomator is extremely easy to use. Some of the other solutions seemed way too complicated to even attempt and this is the first time I’ve actually worked with encryption at this level. I might even start to use online storage as a result…
I think all wise choices.
Although I am a Xubuntu user and I am not affected of course, I hope the LM team can provide all affected users with a migration guide from LM KDE to Kubuntu/Other LM spices, from LMDE MATE to Debian/LMDE Cinnamon (backup /home, install a fresh system and then restore, etc). This will be very helpful to novice users.
Just a fan-boy review here: I love Linux Mint! Great work. I feel so lucky to be using Mint for my home and work. After putting up with Microsoft for so many years, I just can’t say enough about how refreshing your work is. Thanks so much.
Would love to see you presented as clem. :). The “Linux Mint” seems so very impersonal. Yea, the curtain lets some one stand in with out a bunch of emotional shifting. But I feel that process should be valued and respected. I feel respectful and respected when it is apparent that a real person is involved. I think at this point many reading understand its clem but that will fade. It will keep the exchanges more constantly respectful in the future when it will not be apparent that it is you.
Very good choices! Timeshift is great. When will be released LM 18.3? Kernel version?
Thank You!
First off, thank you team Mint for all the years of a wonderful desktop. I only last year switched from the Cinnamon edition to the KDE Plasma 5 edition. I must say that as much as I loved Cinnamon, I fell in love with Plasma 5! I am sad to see it go from the stable of Mint editions. But, I totally understand.
I feel myself in a state of grieving, because your team, IMO, produced the most polished KDE of the “stable” distros. I don’t consider Arch or Manjaro, or even Tumbleweed, an option for myself. I can’t afford for even minor breakages in various software applications. Which is why I didn’t stick with Manjaro, as exciting as it was to get the next Plasma update. As for comparison with the other stable distros that provide KDE, Linux Mint is the best because of its polished driver manager, software update manager, super stable software center, and other Mint toys. Best of all, I don’t get those annoying Apport error popups as I would get with any Ubuntu spin. (This is why I stick with Mint for family members: The last thing grandma needs is to have an apport error dialog pop up and scare her.) There are many other finicky things with stock Ubuntu that all Ubuntu spins inherit that Mint does not suffer from. The Mint team truly deserves a pat on the back for the polish that you have added on top of Ubuntu. Quite frankly, if Canonical had focused on such polish in the first place, there would be no need for Mint. I thank God you stepped up to the plate to take the Linux desktop to the next level.
Even though I’ll need to hunt for another stable KDE distro, you deserve my thanks for the many years of wonderful computing experience, as well as my donations. And if KDE should go in a direction that doesn’t work for me, I’ll know that I always have a computing home here with Linux Mint.
I concur that LMDE2 with MATE runs best on my Dell Desktop+Samsung Monitor. Cinnamon stresses the fans more. I like Cinnamon but MATE is practical and does the job for me, also on an old laptop. If your resources were to permit, I would wait after the release of LMDE3 Cinnamon for a MATE version. So please do consider not ruling out MATE for LMDE3 at some future point.
Thanks for all the effort and genuine concern for the way users work with LM.
I am glad that you have finally admitted that LMDE is an afterthought. Thanks! BTW you waste no time when a new version of Ubuntu is released to release a new standard edition. The amount of time it’s taking for LMDE3 is almost laughable.
I migrated from KDE to Cinnamon and the feature I most miss is the search for files in the Menu.
Is it possible to implement this?
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=256357&p=1382755&hilit=search+search+files#p1382755
Very exciting news! Can’t wait for the new Mint!
I have a question about Gnome Online Accounts. How this new feature will affect on system resources? Are they will need more CPU power, or RAM consumption will be higher than now? I have always been thinking that they are one of the things thats make Gnome and Unity heavier and slower…
Thank you!
BTW, Xed looks gorgeous!
As a relative n00b to the Linux world and determined to leave the Windoze world behind… I read this entire page, comments and all. My head hurts! I’ve only tried a few different distros but Mint ran beautifully on my ancient laptop, albeit with a few power management tweaks (T3000 Celeron… Meh) but Cinnamon looked pretty good. I’ve now ploughed through Manjaro Xfce, Solus MATE and now Mint Xfce in virtual machines on my A8 PC. I really like them all… But Mint Xfce seems to be working well, so if Manjaro works as nicely on the old laptop, Mint Xfce is going to be the end of Windows for my PC life. I honestly thought it would be a lot harder to get into but you guys have made it an absolute breeze (Terminal does bring back some less than fond memories of CP/M but now I’m just showing my age). Thank you for showing me there is life after Windows 7 (I’d get banned for printing what I think of 10). 😉
Flatpak looks to be the software version of the biological symbiosis. I’m excited to try the ‘Redshift’ option. Good work!
KDE will be missed!
I understand the need to focus the scarce resources on the flagship DE (Cinnamon) but KDE/MINT is, in mi opinion the best debian-based DE available at the moment. I will move away from MINT with regret/sadness has it has been my reliable work horse for many years. Hopefully someone else will continue the work on KDE, in a similar way to what happen when MINT dropped KDE based LMDE: not naming names here but the hint is obvious. Crossing my finger! Thanks to the MINT team for all the good work done so far and best luck with Cinnamon.
Yeah. I think that MINT was the best, as in most polished, distribution.
Then came the move towards systemd, now KDE is also gone – I guess the downwards spiral has begun a while ago already.
Oddly enough, I find xfce and the mate-desktop to be vastly superior to gnome3.
Will Linux Mint release Linux Mint Budgie in future? Would be great if it becomes possible for Mint team.
Budgie 11 will based on the QT tool kit, rather than the current GTK. That will put it in the same category as KDE Plasma is now in that it would take special effort and resources to make it work well on Mint.
This is a very sad news. Linux Mint KDE has been my main distro for years, and it helped me make many people switch from Windows to Linux. I found it a lot better than Kubuntu: easier to install (less compatibility problems), more stable and more polished.
I really hope somebody will pick the project up and continue it, this is a great loss to the community.
Is automatic update of Flatpak apps strictly necessary from the technical point of view?
*** an small sugestion for next relase… linux mint its kind of “out of the package” solution, i just work in full at the moment you installed.. so…. could you please add a question at the installation menu, where linuxmint ask you if you want to install 3rd party codecs… so we can install all the samba programs (the one that where taken out in resent relases) (please…)
wooow, can’t wait to put my fingers over the new relase.
– i dont use kde, it is grate guys you focus on what you think is important (i guess a lot of people wont like the change).
Thanks for the news, guys. I really agree with your plans. I usually prefer distros promoting and concentrating their work on just one or two desktop environments. And there are enough KDE distros for making everyone happy to my mind.
I’m a big LMDE2 user. Though I use the Mate version, I agree it’s better to optimize and put efforts on your own Cinnamon DE.
Long life to Linux Mint.
Dearly.
Just wanted to stop in and say thank you for all the years that you supported the KDE edition of Mint. Ever since Plasma 5 came out, I fell in love with that desktop and moved away from Cinnamon (which is still fantastic!). But of all the stable distros that had a Plasma edition, Linux Mint had the best! Your team deserves kudos on such a splendid integration of Mint tools with KDE. Alas, I now must find another KDE distro, but I know I’ll always have a home here with Linux Mint if my workflow and needs ever change to better fit Cinnamon or Mate. I am sorry to see Mint KDE go, but I understand why. Nevertheless, Team Mint deserves my undying thanks for the fantastic desktop user experience you provided me.
Will there be Gdebi like GUI installer for flatpak? so if I want to, i can download .flatpak file directly from developers website and simply install it by double clicking on it like i can with VirtualBox .deb file for example which i download and double click to install with Gdebi.
I’m really unhappy that you’ll abandon the KDE. For now I have no alternative. Where to find distro as good as Mint is with its comfort of use and great stability? From 19th Mint will have only “less-resources consuming” environments but I prefer “more-complex” and “less taking up” ones.
Great work, I can’t wait to see the new release. However some issues I’d like to point out:
1) When I installed LM 18.2 some parts of Java went missing and I couldn’t get my Java Forex platform working. I had to install LM 18.1, then roll it up to the 18.2 release.
2) Nemo still keeps crashing when copying files between 2 USB drives (one HD and one USB stick), try 5-6 files and during navigation it crashes. Please get it fixed, thank you.
3) Any desktop widget/gadget added like a clock causes Cinnamon to crash frequently and has to be restarted.
Thanks
Richard
I like others have adopted Mint KDE because it is ‘awsome’. It took me years of testing to settle on a disto that worked for me, and have been using Mint KDE for years on top of that. I am very sad to hear it will end. But having said that, I do understand why.
I will be using Mint 18.3 KDE when it is released, but I will keep in mind it’s demise.
Can anyone recomend another distro that is as easy to use as Mint KDE out of the box?
Or is it better to just use another Mint flavor and install KDE on top?
Well, its terrible to hear that Mint KDE version is going to be discontinued. Am disappointed because the alternative the suggest — Kubuntu — is still very very unstable. I use Linux Mint MATE on at my work computer. Its very stable that’s why.
However, I wanted KDE on my laptop. KDE has more productivity tools such as Gwenview, Ksnapshot, dolphine, Konversation that I find highly more feature-rich and powerful that the Mate alternatives. So I really liked to have a stable KDE OS. Before learning about Mint KDE, I installed Kubuntu which had all the KDE plasma 5 goodness but was highly unstable. Believe me, I kept getting “program crashed” window and KDE needed to restart. When I switched over to Mint KDE, I have never ever had that experience. Mint KDE just worked flawless and finally I thought I had found where my heart could rest on the terribly fragmented Linux distro ecosystem.
Chances that I won’t move over to Kubuntu until am absolutely sure they have the same stability that Mint KDE and MATE have. I’ll stick with Mint MATE on my work computer and will keep the old Mint KDE Soya on my laptop until Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on which its based is nolonger supported.
I applaud the Mint developers for creating the most user-friendly, solid and super stable Linux distros anyone can use.
“It is important for Linux Mint to continue to support LMDE as a fallback option …”
It will be soooooo nice if LMDE3 (cinnamon/mate only) will be main and only edition of Linux Mint Team;
That will consolidate resources, and allow Team to be more relaxed. Now, with Flatpak you do not have to fear about contemporarity.
As for “… in case Ubuntu ever disappeared …”
I gotta feeling that will happen in a next 2 years (although I do not use it, I do not wish that, it is just a feeling)
“Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so”.
Always Linux Mint KDE was the most suitable for me, until present, even if I’m using (or tried) other Linux Mint DE.
Anyway, which is the difference between Linux Mint 18.3 KDE and Linux Mint 18.2 KDE?
Hello all, I’m very sad KDE is dropped by Mint as all computers in my (little) company uses Mint+KDE because we felt it were the best combination. Now we have even inner tools relying on KDE, therefore we can only drop Mint if KDE isn’t supported any longer, unfortunately. I don’t know toward which distro yet, Kubuntu LTS maybe, something very stable and compatible which what we do that’s for sure.
Just FYI: I’ll miss the KDE release. I had installed Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon a couple years ago instead of the KDE version, but about a month ago I decided to go back to KDE. I went back because Cinnamon just didn’t provide the same window management features that KDE does. I would be more specific if I could, but I’m happy with KDE again, and I’ve forgotten what annoyed me about Cinnamon. If I do Cinnamon again, I’ll be sure to make notes.
(It may have been 18.1 Cinnamon I installed a couple years ago or maybe even 17.x. I forget, but I switched from 18.2 Cinnamon back to 18.2 KDE with a fresh install recently.)
Do you have any plans to deliver Cinnamon on wayland starting with LM19?
Functionality and security should be the first priority. I have seen that in Gnome is running very stable. KDE is pushing hard to have it complete with plasma 5.12.
Do you see any risk to stick too long with the X and remain a dinosaur? I mean, the transition will not happen over night but you should start at some point no?
LinuxMint has explained a lot and gone into much depth to convey the pathways the team is going. Thank You LinuxMint Team for taking so much time to explain. Sometimes more than once. Over the years the team have only moved forward making it a very stable and user friendly experience. The direction of each Linux Distro and teams can vary and it’s good to have many choices. However sometimes it can be confusing. I love trying other Linux Distros. However I always use LinuxMint on my everyday machines. I love the look of KDE but I prefer the Cinnamon menu. Its alway comes down to personal choice. I used Mate for years after Ubuntu moved to Unity. Although to be fair you could enable classic menu when you logged in. I love XFCE I also used that for many years. To be honest I kinda hated Cinnamon at the start. I have grown to love it and how it has grown. Now I can’t not use Cinnamon. It is progress that has made Cinnamon shine.
I’m also saddened to see that linux Mint 18.3 will be the last distro of mint to provide KDE. I’ve tried all of the DEs that linux mint offers naturally and for the machines that could run it well, preferred KDE over the others. Although 18.3 will give me several years to decide on a new distro, it’s still a bit of a pain. I’ve succesfully migrated not only most of my own network over to linux mint, but various family members computers and personal friends. KDE has been a major selling point to get them to make the switch. It’s a shame that you’ve decided to no longer support it. I realize some people prefer the other DE’s, but I for one really enjoy KDE.
I’m fairly certain your minds are already made up, but as another posted suggested some posts back; would it be feasible to continue providing a KDE flavor of Linux Mint after 18.3 for awhile longer? I realize the KDE releases are usually the last in line to become available and I don’t mind waiting for what I feel is a fantastic DE. I'[m sure others wouldn’t mind waiting for additional KDE releases either. I just don’t think dropping KDE after the new 18.3 is the right thing to do at this point. You don’t have to spend tons of time tinkering and polishing it, take your time, release updates to the DE as you see fit. Please don’t leave those of us who decided to give Linux Mint a go with the KDE interface. I’m almost certain those of us who are using KDE wouldn’t mind having to wait a bit longer for isos with KDE vs having to decide on another distro that offers it out of the box. While Linux is certainly easier to copy your things to other media for an OS reload, I’m almost certain those of us using Mint are doing so because we really do enjoy this particular distro. And, like I wrote previously, I doubt many of us would mind if it took you awhile to provide updates for KDE. It doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest and potentially unstable. I tend to take stability over the latest features and eyecandy any day myself and I doubt i’m in the minority on this.
Linux Mint with KDE has been a fantastic experience and I’ll be sad to see it no longer provided after the anticipated and eager to play with 18.3 version. I’m almost certain whatever issues I’ve been having with the previous versions will be cleared up by the time you officially release 18.3.
Thanks for your time and consideration!
The new mintinstall (Software Manager) looks great but it does not show any progress bar when I install new software. I am not sure that this was intended?
Good decision to drop KDE from your official releases. Personally, I cannot see any benefits of running Linux Mint KDE instead of Kubuntu (except for new Plasma on an LTS base). This decision will probably give you more time to develop your other editions.
From the article: “Flatpak apps are updated automatically when you log in”.
What exactly does that mean? That the list of available updates get refreshed? Or new versions of the apps themselves get downloaded and installed?
Hope it’s not the latter, as that would mean going the Windows 10 route…
It’s the latter and it’s something that you can disable by clicking a checkbox in Menu -> Startup Applications.
I suppose a few dozen users might read that here… this is a bit obscure, it makes Linux Mint inherently unstable. I suggest you should change the default to Off.
Yes, I do know that many are clamoring for auto update everything, as well as eliminating all password requirements. You are in a position to educate people of the risks involved.
No, this is different than regular updates. First, this isn’t something that runs as root, it doesn’t require admin privileges. Second, flatpaks do not impact your operating system, they run in their own separate environment. Third, contrary to your operating system which is stable by design and which sits on a frozen LTS package base, flatpaks are bleeding edge by design and the whole concept is for you to access the very latest available from the developers themselves.
I realize that FlatPaks are there to enable installing bleeding-edge app versions, but I don’t think many people want their apps to constantly update once they’re installed (and possibly break or remove useful features, which happens all too often).
I understand, and there’s also the argument of controlling bandwidth and download quotas. Security is an argument in favor of updates also. There is no one-size-fits-all here and so we have to settle on a default. That’s what we did and we took care to make this trivial to enable/disable so people could change it easily and see it when reviewing their starting applications. At the moment in flatpak there is no notion of changelogs or versions/policies like we have with APT. Still, we can add basic support in the Update Manager going forward, probably in Mint 19. In the meantime, we’ve got this solution. This is something we thought about. It’s a pretty good solution for now but we can of course do better in the future.
Thank you for the answers.
> it’s something that you can disable by clicking a checkbox in Menu -> Startup Applications.
If I disable it, will I be able to update individual flatpacks? Or is it all-or-nothing choice?
> There is no one-size-fits-all here and so we have to settle on a default.
That’s understandable… Problem is, you already have a default for packages, and that default is “ask the user”. I’m afraid a different default for flatpacks will be viewed my most as inconsistency, and rightfully so.
> flatpaks do not impact your operating system, they run in their own separate environment
End users do not care where operating system ends, and where that separate environment starts.
I first tried Linux circa 1995, installed Midnight Commander (one of the first versions, as I understand now; I was hooked to Volkov Commander at the time, so immediately searched for a closest Linux counterpart), and then… happened to press a “wrong” button, it seems. It crashed. OK, I launched it again, pressed some F? key, it crashed again. Hmm… OK. Next time I tried Linux five years later.
> flatpaks are bleeding edge by design and the whole concept is for you
> to access the very latest available from the developers themselves
I for one may not need “bleeding edge”, I could settle for something that’s just not 3 years old; as, say, is RawThrerapee 4.2 bundled with Mint 18.1. Once I update it to the version supporting my camera, I’m basically done… And I suspect many others will use Flatpacks similarly.
> we can add basic support [for changelogs] in the Update Manager going forward
That would be much appreciated.
For me, flatpacks will be a valuable addition: I did have to use appimages on several occasions, and sometimes have to build apps from sources, so anything that provides easier access to newer SW versions is most welcome. I did not upgrade to 18.2, but 18.3 definitely looks like something I will try.
Thanks again.
*Sigh* Oh well …
Goodbye Linux Mint KDE, hello Kubuntu 😀
Why doesn’t Linux Mint include hardinfo which is a good GUI alternative to Device Manager in Windows?
https://i.stack.imgur.com/ab0yv.png
Please include hardinfo package by default in Linux Mint 18.3. We shouldn’t require to install hardinfo by ourselves. Windows users often use Device Manager mostly to see listed devices so they will be looking for similar when they switch to Linux and they most likely don’t know Terminal command or don’t want to use Terminal.
I’m wondering why did you add support for OwnCloud in Nemo instead of Nextcloud?
I’m seeing that most of the people recommend Nextcloud for its features and complete openness.
Not having time to install and test both solutions, I trusted others’ opinions and I installed only Nextcloud on my Raspberry pi and it works great.
Does your support for Owncloud also works for Nextcloud?
Too bad you’re dropping KDE which is actually adding support for Nextcloud.
https://dot.kde.org/2016/12/13/plasma-meets-nextcloud
I hope you understand why it’s better to support open and gratis software.
I know that you’ll think this through and get the best decision.
Thank you!
I agree that Nextcloud looks the better of the two.
https://civihosting.com/blog/nextcloud-vs-owncloud/
To add- it appears this functionality is really a side effect of integrating a feature of the upstream Gnome – hence it’s a bonus rather than something the Mint team developed themselves.
OwnCloud is in the Debian Stable repos, that makes it a no effort no brainer.
Nextcloud is too new, a relative unknown, stability wise.
Hi,
As Nomen Luni mentioned, this is support for GNOME Online Account, a background service developed and maintained by GNOME. It is this service which implements connectivity to 3rd party online services. What we did here is add a configuration frontend to that.
I do believe to reduce support term from that based on Ubuntu LTS from 5 to 2 years when new LTS base will be completed would make more sense and will safe more recources. Maybe changing main base from Ubuntu to Debian also would be valueable at some poit. I do enjoy Mint and very excited about XED and Nemo, still hate to compile new python version and other stuff. Flatpak ecosystem and 2 years support if on LTS or even Debian would be pretty much reasonable.
When are you going to release Mint 18.3? In a few days or weeks?
Please try to fix/preconfigure so the latest nvidia drivers binding bug is not happening no more..
I think Mint team should pre-include Nvidia PPA so users installing latest Nvidia drivers from Driver Manager is out of the box if you have Nvdia GPU.
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Signal has now launched a standalone desktop app. This should definitely be in the Mint repository, and likely should be made a default app in Mint:
https://signal.org/blog/standalone-signal-desktop/
I would like to report some early issues I found in LM18.3 Cinnamon 3.6.0 and to help the developers to have them fix before the release.
1) In system settings all the Administration settings except Driver Manager are not working. I enter the password but nothing happens.
2) Would it be possible in the next Cinnamon release to use the theme colors for the new task bar windows progress?
For example if I choose Mint-X Aqua the windows progress color should be blue. Now it is always red and it a bit out of place.
sudo cinnamon-settings-users
(cinnamon-settings-users.py:4664): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_settings_get_for_screen: assertion ‘GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)’ failed
/usr/share/cinnamon/cinnamon-settings-users/cinnamon-settings-users.py:429: Warning: g_object_get_qdata: assertion ‘G_IS_OBJECT (object)’ failed
self.builder.add_from_file(“/usr/share/cinnamon/cinnamon-settings-users/cinnamon-settings-users.ui”)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I checked the “System report crash report”
Fri Nov 10 18:40:44 2017 _usr_share_cinnamon_cinnamon-settings-users_cinnamon-settings-users.py.0.crash
The file/var/crash/_usr_share_cinnamon_cinnamon-settings-users_cinnamon-settings-users.py.0.crash could not be read.
Please fix its permissions.
I changed the permissions but the report file is huge and I do not want to paste it here.
Is there any reason not to create the report in home directory?
if I run the following command line it’s working.
/usr/bin/python2 /usr/share/cinnamon/cinnamon-settings-users/cinnamon-settings-users.py
hi Magni,
We don’t take feedback prior to BETA. This is a good example of why we don’t do that… we’re already aware of that bug and as I write this right now it’s already fixed.
Dear Clem..
The past couple of days I have been test driving Debian 9, and Ubuntu 17.10.. All I can say is..I am so very grateful for your work on MATE.. Nothing, absolutely nothing compares. I forgot how much Mint Mate adds to my life and how easy it is when everything I like in a DE just works!! Well done! And..
Keep It Coming!
the newly released xfce versions are not for older computers,if you want a version of xfce for older computers you will need to get an older distro of linux mint xfce.Unfortunately these older distros are not supported anymore.My 11 year old toshiba satellite does work with the latest versions,but these latest version cause many other issues when restarting and powering off such as power off hang. But windows 7 works just fine.
And yes wayland works great for intel sandy bridge chipset.I tried ubuntu gnome but it uses way too much mememory 2 GB twice what cinnamon uses.
You may want to get Debian 9 (Stretch) XFCE.
It runs lighter than Mint 18.2 XFCE.
It takes a couple of hours to configure a pleasant desktop and install some additional software but once its done, it’s great.
I would like to ask the mint team if the Romeo repository is still used, because I have not seen since a long time any testing packages. Now what happened and if is not used anymore why it is still there?
Hi Magni,
It’s used as a temporary staging area. In many cases we’re able to ship or test packages without the need for Romeo, but it’s handy in niche cases.
Nemo still keeps crashing when moving or copying files on external HDD or USB drives. I hope will be not the case in 18.3!
Please submit clear instructions on how to ALWAYS reproduce the issue, as well as a stack trace and core dump of the crash.
Whilst waiting with bated breath for Mint Sylvia I am using Mint Sonya MATE64, if only for its sensors and ability to throttle the CPU without needing Shut Down and Restart.
I have therefor been taking a look at the all-important host PCS, having been badly burnt with the original MintBox.
MicroSoft have further extended their Windows10 monopoly by banishing legacy BIOS supply although not in the case of Lenovo whose upside-down ‘u’ Novo button allows LinuxMint compatible reversion to a capable ‘Legacy BIOS’, so all is not yet lost whilst folk fiddle with making Mint more Windows-like.
Hi Linux Mint Team,
Many thanks for all the great work you’re doing! I love using Linux Mint!
However, I’m puzzled by your use, several times, of the word “trivial” in the October News blog, in describing the implementation of certain new features.
Since, in common usage, trivial means “of little significance or value”, “of little worth or importance”, surely you meant to say, instead, “simple” or “easy”?! 🙂
Hi Tom,
Indeed. Thanks for pointing this out. I assumed it had the same meaning as in French. I realize now it doesn’t.
Are you still going to continue with the LTS for KDE that has been publish to date?
We’ll continue to support what we committed to and we’ll release the edition for 18.3.
@ LINUX MINT
To reproduce the problem is very simple:open two windows of Nero, one of a folder situated on internal HDD, and one of another folder on external HDD, and start to move dates from one to another. After a while Nero will crash. With LM 18 and 18.1 I did not have this problem.
I don’t know haw to make a stack trace and core dump of the crash.
“After a while” is the problem here. It does not happen here. You’re looking at a problem which only impacts some ppl and which cause we don’t understand. Until this is deterministic and we have more information about it, we cannot fix it. Hopefully mintreport will help with getting stack traces in 18.3.
About Cinnamon, it would be nice if Cinnamon auto restarts if Cinnamon crashes instead of yes/no dialog box. A 10 second timer on yes button on dialog box would be fine too so Cinnamon auto restarts after 10 sec.
https://i.imgur.com/BLjT5Xv.png
If you look in Users and Groups in Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon ,we are logging in as administrator instead of custom. Is this safe before we realize we are on the Internet as administrator? In the Mate edition it is set as custom. In Cinnamon I create a standard user account and use it instead of the administrator account. Also why isn’t the firewall enabled by default?
Stan, the first rule to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is “Don’t Panic”. Why doesn’t the router provided by your ISP block all outgoing traffic by default? How would you administer and create users and groups if you weren’t the superuser? What’s the meaning of life?
Seriously though, and 42 aside, does it matter if you elevate the privs on action or on launching the configuration tool? From a security point of view, no, it doesn’t. If you want to argue that point, please be more pragmatic and consider the convenience and user experience angle.
Yes, it’s better to elevate privs later rather than sooner because it allows more interactions before the need to enter a password. It’s convenient. We’ve improved that in the Software Manager and the Backup Tool in 18.3. When it comes to Users and Groups, that tool is targeted specifically at superusers/admins. There’s nothing for you to do or see in there if you’re not root.. because only root administers other users.
“..the first rule to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is “Don’t Panic”.
Ha! Good book too!
Add progress bar support in Nemo for F2FS (Flash Friendly File System).
It would be good in Linux Mint Cinnamon to have a progress bar monitoring the copy process of file/s to a USB
pen drive using the F2FS (as it happens when you use the FAT32).
I find F2FS to be a better FS in linux, for USB drives, being much faster than fAT32:
1gb file coy F2FS = 2+mins
1gb file opy FAT32 = 5+mins
thanks!
When is Mint 18.3 going to be released? You didn’t mention timing at all.
The standart answer you will get is: When it’s ready! 🙂
Based on the prevoius releases should happen in Nov-Dec.
Keeping an eye on the roadmap will give you a general idea of progress. The ‘Maintenance’ and ‘Issues’ sections seem to indicate work still in progress:
https://github.com/linuxmint/Roadmap
PS: Good things come to those who wait 🙂
Hello to the Mint-Team
Nice blog here and I like it. And I also like MInt 18.2 Mate. I would like to stick with it and I hope, Mate will also be released in future together with Cinnamon.
But one question referring to the Flatpack-Apps.
When I have installed a flatpack-app, where do I find it in my system to launch it?? Because you wrote, we won’t find it in “installed apps”. So: where will we find them??
Because this toppic looks quite interesting.
And I am looking forward to Mint 18.3 as always. 😀
And which base will MInt 18.3 have?? And will it be possible to install it via update-path as always??
Greetings to the whole Mint-Team from Mintkatze
edit: have a nice weekend!!
Will Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 64-bit beta be available in the Update Manager?
Or does the ISO need to be downloaded:
https://community.linuxmint.com/iso/view/504
Thank you
Thank you for making the Linux Mint 18.3 beta ISO available at:
https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/testing/
I think LMDE Cinnamon only is not great because to me the main reason to use LMDE is stability and the fact that is lighter. LMDE with Cinnamon sound like a FIAT 500 with a truck trailer.
Many people say: “If you computer is fast enough why not using KDE or Cinnamon?”.
My thinking is the opposite: “Why don’t have much power for important things instead of wasting power in frivolousness?” and many don’t think about another question that should raise in a world full of CO2: “Why SPEND MORE on electricty used by the VGA and CPU to draw useless things?”. Every shadow, every animation, every overkilling stuff, comes at a cost, even if it’s hidden. In a year the bill is different and the CO2 as well, for nothing really important (at least for me).
That why I prefer a light DE like XFCE or MATE (that it’s even too much for me), even working with an i7.
And that’s why I think it’s important to have the alternative of XFCE or Mate for every distro (especially LMDE).
Will Firefox 57 update be available in the Linux Mint Update Manager on November 14, 2017?
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum/
Thank you
Any possibility of adding split view capability to xed? I installed Kate in Mint Mate for that reason. It works, but it’s not really a good fit. Besides, I just like xed better.
Any possibility to add in the repository Firefox for developers?
https://www.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/developer/
Thanks.
I use only cinnamon if it does not become a short time to sit on the mait and go to winds. Cinnamon often falls on the usual and on Debian there is no Video Driver Installer. Problem with L2tp they are not in the installer … I’m tired of looking for solutions after 5 years linux of sitting on Windows for the second week …
In lmde3 from the box, make a video installer and Vpn l2tp. with boxes too. apologies for translation
I am so sad KDE is dropped but I can understand why. I will use Mint KDE until end-of-life because it’s the best KDE distro for me, not bleeding edge but very stable and compatible with all Debian/Ubuntu stuff and I love the Synaptic package / update manager and the fact that Teamviewer or any other external .deb package installs and runs without any extra trouble.
I have tried KaOS (stable, fast but their software repo is still too small at the moment), Neon KDE (fast but Plasma refuses to start 1 out of 5 logins), Manjaro KDE (nice and stable but Arch still lacks some popular software)
KDE is better than Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce in my opinion, not only a matter of looks or RAM usage but also because of the standard programs like Dolphin and Kate for example which have much more functions and customisation options.
KDE is faster and less memory hungry than Cinnamon which is second in looks and options. Mate and Xfce are fast but turn your pc into a 90’s model with too simple software like thunar for example.
This is tremendously sad news about KDE. Perhaps it’s petty, but I can’t stand the look, feel, and functionality of the GTK file load/save dialog. Even when I use something like GIMP in Windows, I hate it. There are, of course, other reasons to prefer KDE.
The saddest thing now is that I’ll have to wade back into the politics of distros and DEs to either choose an alternative Mint DE or an alternative KDE distro. BTW, Arch is a terrible alternative to Mint. Mint is polished, has almost everything you could want natively and preconfigured, and I haven’t experienced anything breaking. Arch requires all sorts of manual configuring and compiling, and things break spontaneously all the time, particularly CUPS. Plus, getting PlexMediaServer to work on it is much more difficult than dpkg -i plex…
One of the best things about Mint is that because it’s based on Ubuntu LTS, you can get pretty much the exact server software versions on it that are on your Ubuntu LTS VPS.
So…anyone want to make an argument for Mate or Cinnamon? Heck, it’s been so long since I’ve looked at DEs that I don’t even remember anything about them except they use GTK.
Hi Linux Mint Team,
You’ve said that some of your primary goals are to make Linux Mint “efficient, easy to use, and elegant”, and I’m assuming that you would also like to make it easy for angry, frustrated, disillusioned, and relatively non-techie Windows users (like me) to easily and enjoyably make the transition to Linux.
After trying Ubuntu several years ago, and finding it interesting, but, ultimately unusable –
slow, buggy, and bloated – I eventually installed Linux Mint when version 18 was released.
My experience with Linux Mint since then has been mostly easy and enjoyable. (My worst experience was my computer crashing after installing LightDM, by the way!) However, my most ongoing frustration has been that the descriptions of installed and available packages is only in tech-speak, not plain English!
So, I don’t know whether specific packages are something I actually need and want, or are necessary for the proper functioning of the distro. (Am I supposed to assume that everything installed by default is essential?!)
I’ve noticed that the descriptions of several packages installed by default seem to indicate that they’re primarily geared toward users on networks, administrators, developers, web designers, and programmers. None of this applies to me!
Yet, when I’ve gone to Synaptic Package Manager to completely remove some of the packages, which, it seemed to me, I didn’t need, I found that doing so would also remove Cinnamon!
So, if you have any control or influence over the description of packages, please, please, include, in addition to tech-speak, simple, plain English descriptions, understandable to novices like me who may not have the time to spend many long hours researching every unfamiliar term!
At the very least, please be very clear and upfront about which packages installed by default can be safely removed without breaking the distro, and which others you recommend (and why), but are optional!