Monthly News – October 2019

GNOME vs Trolls

Before we start with the news, I’d like to bring this to everyone’s attention:

https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/10/gnome-files-defense-against-patent-troll/

We are standing on the shoulders of giants, and among them GNOME is probably the tallest. Ubuntu provides an amazing base for us to build upon. If tomorrow they were to disappear it would be a tragedy for our project. Would it be the end? No, we wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Mint without Ubuntu is LMDE. What would Mint be without GNOME though?

When people hear GNOME they often just think of the desktop environment, i.e. GNOME Shell, a project we don’t use.. a project we don’t use but without which Cinnamon wouldn’t have existed. And a project which came from GNOME2, which we used for years, and without which MATE wouldn’t have existed.

Beyond the desktop environment, GNOME is also a large project which provides us with utilities and applications we use every day: our calculator,  agenda, the disk, screenshot, logs utilities, the system monitor are just a few of them.

Without GNOME there would be no Xapp project either. Xed, Xplayer, Xreader, Pix, Xviewer are forked from GNOME apps. Blueberry is a frontend to gnome-bluetooth etc etc..

Last but not least, absolutely “everything” we do, everything we develop here at Linux Mint relies on GNOME libraries and toolkits. What would Mint be without GNOME, GTK and its many libraries? I really don’t know. If it existed at all, it would definitely be completely different.

Today GNOME is under threat and it needs your help. If there’s ever been a moment to acknowledge how much this project means to us, this is it. I hope you can support them as much as you’re supporting us.

You can contribute to the GNOME Patent Troll Defense Fund at https://secure.givelively.org/donate/gnome-foundation-inc/gnome-patent-troll-defense-fund.

Alternatively you can also help them by donating at https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/donate/.

Date format

The default date format was fixed in Cinnamon and MATE. It will now properly follow the locale set by LC_TIME, and this locale is configurable in the Language Settings.

XAppStatusIcon

Work on the XAppStatusIcon API is finished. Applets were added to Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. LibAppIndicator was patched. We’ll have crisp icons in all environments in 19.3, HiDPI compatible, with support for symbolic icons and without rendering issues.

Linux Mint 19.3 ETA and codename

The upcoming version of Linux Mint will be codenamed “Tricia”. It will be released for Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce in 32-bit and 64-bit just before Christmas.

New logo

New splash screens were made for Grub:

Grub boot screen

and Plymouth:

Plymouth boot splash animation

Celluloid

Xplayer and VLC will be replaced by Celluloid 0.17.

Celluloid 0.17

The mpv based player will be properly integrated within the OS and provide much better performance.

Gnote

Tomboy will be replaced by Gnote 3.34. With the exception of the tray icon, Gnote provides the same functionality as Tomboy but it is built on modern technology.

Gnote 3.34

With Tomboy gone we no longer need Mono in Linux Mint. Tomboy was also one of the very few remaining apps we shipped by default which didn’t support HiDPI.

Xfce

Xfce will be upgraded to 4.14, based on GTK3 and with initial support for HiDPI.

Xfce 4.14

HWE stack

To boost compatibility with modern hardware, Linux Mint 19.3 will ship with kernel 5.0 and Xorg 1.20.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

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

Sucuri
Bronze Sponsors:
Vault Networks *
AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting
Goscomb
BGASoft Inc
David Salvo
Simple Mobile Tools
Community Sponsors:

Donations in September:

A total of $8917 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 523 donors:

$300, B
$216, Julius G.
$216, Maximilian P.
$150, Steve J.
$120, William C.
$112 (2nd donation), Mary A.
$109, Cédric B.
$108, The Badgast
$108, Claude L.
$104, Pete M.
$100 (2nd donation), Stephen J. K.
$100 (2nd donation), Laserlab, Inc.
$100 (2nd donation), Leon K.
$100, Frank K. aka “Schlumpel”
$100, David B.
$100, Erik A.
$100, Eddy Ferguson aka “Fast_Eddy”
$100, David L.
$100, Christopher G.
$80 (2nd donation), Regis F.
$62 (4th donation), Allan G.
$60 (3rd donation), Troy O.
$60, David B.
$54 (11th donation), Volker P.
$54 (6th donation), Hans-Georg Thien
$54 (4th donation), D P. B.
$54 (3rd donation), Renaud C.
$54 (2nd donation), Gildas M.
$54 (2nd donation), Ioannis F.
$54, Guillaume B.
$54, Stephanie B.
$54, Niall E.
$54,
$54, Stefan S.
$54, Hans H.
$50 (16th donation), Thomas T. aka “FullTimer1489”
$50 (10th donation), Peter S. aka “Pierre”
$50 (6th donation), Wade T.
$50 (2nd donation), Eugene Z.
$50 (2nd donation), Jens U. S.
$50 (2nd donation), Johannes O.
$50 (2nd donation), Dan O.
$50, John L.
$50, Aaron S.
$50, Terry W.
$50, Steven A.
$50, Shekhar T. V.
$50, Robert S.
$50, Jason R.
$50, Andy H.
$50, Herve L.
$50, Enid H.
$50, Andrew Smith
$50, Nicholas J. aka “Nickcib01”
$44, Torsten P.
$43 (2nd donation), Jörg B.
$42, Nicolas Ambrose Books
$40 (21st donation), Lance M.
$40 (3rd donation), Robert T.
$40 (3rd donation), John S.
$40 (2nd donation), Alan M.
$38 (2nd donation), C. M. .
$36 (3rd donation), Christian Z. aka “CyboSan”
$35, Getson M.
$33 (113th donation), Olli K.
$32 (114th donation), Olli K.
$32 (4th donation), Daniel S.
$32, Jürgen H.
$32, Mokueda Ltd.
$32, Alexander M.
$32, Florian S.
$30 (6th donation), B. H. .
$30 (4th donation), Clemens N.
$30 (3rd donation), Annie B.
$30 (2nd donation), Patrick M.
$30, JongCheol Lee aka “jclee”
$30, Terry G.
$30, Felipe C.
$30, z .
$27 (5th donation), Gerryt M.
$27 (4th donation), Jose M. K. Z.
$27 (2nd donation), Ismael G. B.
$27, Kanthavel P.
$27, Arnd G.
$27, Andries Johannes O.
$27, Jouke L.
$27, Paul S.
$27, Ulf S.
$27, Wolfgang S.
$27, Andreas T.
$25 (97th donation), Ronald W.
$25 (6th donation), George R. aka “Az4x4”
$25 (6th donation), Lennart J.
$25 (4th donation), Ed T aka “EdBot”
$25 (4th donation), Keith M.
$25 (4th donation), Chester L.
$25 (2nd donation), Sidney F.
$25 (2nd donation), Paul D.
$25 (2nd donation), John Brines
$25 (2nd donation), William C.
$25 (2nd donation), Robert P. aka “Rob
$25 (2nd donation), Matt H.
$25, Robert O.
$25, Christopher R.
$25, Craig K.
$25, Peter O.
$25, James L.
$25, Larry B.
$25, Thomas-Louis Simard
$25, Pigswill aka “Post-Industrial Music
$25, Keith V.
$25, Gary R.
$25, Indranuj D.
$25, George E.
$25, Matthew S.
$25, Todd G.
$25, Roby V.
$25, Edward S.
$25, Peter O.
$22 (29th donation), Derek R.
$22 (12th donation), David M.
$22 (5th donation), Steverj aka “Somerset Scrumpy”
$22 (4th donation), Marcel S.
$22 (2nd donation), Christian L.
$22 (2nd donation), Dominik Ch.
$22, Thomas G. aka “thg14”
$22, Laurent G.
$22, Vasilis G.
$22, Iker K. L.
$22, Arnulf A.
$22, Friedrich S.
$22, Antonio O.
$22, Jim aka “Decoherence”
$22, Alf O.
$22, Necla T.
$22, zero
$22, Jean-louis C.
$22, Jean-marc L.
$20 (19th donation), Mike C.
$20 (13th donation), Bryan F.
$20 (11th donation), Mike W aka “bajan52”
$20 (10th donation), Mike W aka “bajan52”
$20 (10th donation), vagrantcow
$20 (6th donation), Robert K.
$20 (6th donation), Martin B.
$20 (5th donation), a donor
$20 (4th donation), Matthew L. A. aka “Matt”
$20 (3rd donation), Ramon A.
$20 (3rd donation), Raymond L.
$20 (3rd donation), Douglas W.
$20 (2nd donation), Manuel O.
$20 (2nd donation), Iain K.
$20 (2nd donation), Khalid A.
$20 (2nd donation), Philip S.
$20, Klaus B.
$20, Alan P.
$20, Kevin J.
$20, Werner K.
$20, Craig J.
$20, David V.
$20, Gissel E. P.
$20, Malcolm S.
$20, Victor A P.
$20, A C.
$19 (33rd donation), Johann J.
$19 (14th donation), Ke C.
$18 (34th donation), Johann J.
$16 (31st donation), Andreas S.
$16 (2nd donation), Eduard K.
$16, Jean-louis G.
$16, Michael D.
$16, Francisco L.
$16, Eddy W.
$16, Stanko Č.
$15 (23rd donation), Stefan M. H.
$15 (5th donation), Tyler B.
$15 (5th donation), C T Johnson, Inc
$15 (4th donation), Fred B.
$15 (3rd donation), Joel C.
$15 (2nd donation), Igor Chistruga aka “dreadangel”
$15, Paul G.
$15, Lynda W.
$15, Felipe M.
$15, Richard F.
$15, Elvio Lampugnani aka “elviolmp”
$15, Edward A.
$13, Konstantin Motovilov aka “motokot
$12 (102th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
$12 (42th donation), JobsHiringNearMe
$12 (3rd donation), Dennis K.
$12 (2nd donation), Krzysztof S.
$12, Victor V.
$11 (35th donation), Paul O.
$11 (34th donation), Paul O.
$11 (12th donation), Denis D.
$11 (11th donation), Raymond M. (retired)
$11 (8th donation), Tomi P.
$11 (8th donation), Michael R.
$11 (7th donation), Christian K.
$11 (6th donation), Piotr L aka “xpil
$11 (4th donation), Franklin P.
$11 (4th donation), Jorge F. M.
$11 (3rd donation), Alexander G. B.
$11 (3rd donation), Serhii B. aka “sinpavla
$11 (2nd donation), Bruno P.
$11 (2nd donation), Nils
$11 (2nd donation), Alexander G. B.
$11 (2nd donation), Marc S.
$11, Maarten L.
$11, Giovanni A.
$11, Markus B.
$11, Gerald S.
$11, Dumont Y.
$11, Carl Bagge aka “CJ”
$11, Johannes D.
$11, Luka K.
$11, Fabiano M.
$11, Ruben C.
$11, Peter L.
$11, Maarten L.
$11, Thomas P.
$11, Jurij K. aka “JuKo”
$11, Rémi F.
$10 (37th donation), Frank K.
$10 (22nd donation), Rick R.
$10 (17th donation), Laura NL aka “lauranl
$10 (11th donation), Richard L. S.
$10 (10th donation), Dohaeng L.
$10 (7th donation), Tony H. aka “TonyH1212”
$10 (7th donation), Andreas S.
$10 (6th donation), mintmem.com aka “mintmem.com
$10 (5th donation), Dana S.
$10 (5th donation), Don S.
$10 (4th donation), Harold R. aka “cyberwolf751”
$10 (4th donation), Kai-ming L.
$10 (3rd donation), Kevin K.
$10 (3rd donation), Francois-R L.
$10 (2nd donation), Marek B.
$10 (2nd donation), Leroy B.
$10 (2nd donation), Erik L.
$10, Robert C.
$10, Juan Carlos Núñez L. aka “proyectos.cading”
$10, Enio B.
$10, Dimosthenis P.
$10, Tim W.
$10, Herman B.
$10, Christian E.
$10, charles crame
$10, Zachary E.
$10, Michael K.
$10, Martin S.
$10, Kris B.
$10, Danail S. aka “Danny”
$10, Window Tinting Sarasota
$10, Isaac E. S. V.
$10, Thomas M.
$10, Kristofer K.
$10, Jim J.
$10, Andy A.
$10, Robert Z.
$10, Felipe H.
$10, Wynton F.
$8 (4th donation), Yuji O. aka “ogaty
$7 (16th donation), Tomasz K.
$7, G W.
$7, François C.
$6 (5th donation), gmq
$6, Rob aka “Venture Lessons
$6, Olivia H.
$6, Helmut R.
$5 (40th donation), Eugene T.
$5 (31st donation), Bhavinder Jassar
$5 (22nd donation), Dmitry P.
$5 (14th donation), Jan Miszura
$5 (10th donation), William Menezes
$5 (9th donation), M. P. V.
$5 (6th donation), Artur M.
$5 (6th donation), Hristo Gatsinski
$5 (5th donation), Willem V. U.
$5 (5th donation), Hristo Gatsinski
$5 (5th donation), Easyumzug24
$5 (5th donation), Sergei K.
$5 (4th donation), Cls D.
$5 (4th donation), A.F.F. aka “ANgazu”
$5 (4th donation), Dominique M.
$5 (4th donation), Alexander G. B.
$5 (4th donation), Mik aka “mikstico”
$5 (3rd donation), Maria L. G. N.
$5 (3rd donation), Florian P.
$5 (3rd donation), Krzysztof S.
$5 (3rd donation), Mark O.
$5 (3rd donation), Paweł M.
$5 (2nd donation), Heinz H.
$5 (2nd donation), Johannes E. aka “élections
$5 (2nd donation), Jürgen K.
$5 (2nd donation), Rogério F.
$5 (2nd donation), Bernd Lauert
$5, Peter W.
$5, Camila B.
$5, Thomas H.
$5, Richard O.
$5, Justin G.
$5, Benjamin G.
$5, Jose Luis T.
$5, Dino
$5, Rogério F.
$5, Des S.
$5, Steuerberater Zürich
$5, Manuel M.
$5, Jean M.
$5, Juliano C.
$5, Adam V.
$5, Miguel Ángel M.
$5, Dinko Š.
$5, Hartmut L.
$5, Ravi S.
$5, Pavel M.
$5, Karl H.
$5, Thomas L.
$5, Alexander G. B.
$5, Daniel S.
$5, Roger B.
$5, Paulo J.
$5, Radko C.
$5, Joshua L.
$5, Evio M.
$5, Swemed
$5, Daniel A. M.
$5, Krankenkassenvergleich
$5, Tyler D.
$5, Oleksii S.
$5, Dan Mullen
$5, Fabio B.
$5, Massimo B.
$5, Ramon S.
$4 (5th donation), Nachtstuck Records
$4 (2nd donation), Absolutely Elite
$4, Christina J.
$4, Donald S.
$4, Robert D.
$4, Tiffany C.
$4, Eva T.
$4, Todd N.
$4, Karen D.
$4, Gary S.
$4, Jennifer O.
$4, Richard O.
$3 (39th donation), Kouji Sugibayashi
$3, Simon B.
$3, Kuntal Kundu
$3, Everton S.
$3, Ivan Grekov aka “Grival”
$3, Stefanie F.
$3, Magdala D.
$3, Russ F.
$3, Linda S.
$2 (7th donation), Life coaching Vancouver aka “Life coach
$2 (4th donation), Fabio Baratti
$2 (3rd donation), Jonas C.
$2 (3rd donation), Felicia G.
$2 (3rd donation), Kelly M.
$2 (3rd donation), Fabrizio D.
$2 (2nd donation), Tito W.
$2 (2nd donation), Kathy M.
$2 (2nd donation), Matt M.
$2 (2nd donation), James B.
$2 (2nd donation), Ivanov M.
$2, Grzegorz N.
$2, Anand V.
$2, Juuso A.
$2, Ali A.
$2, Lubomyr C.
$2, Sigrid S.
$2, Stefan B.
$2, Bob aka “bobzr”
$148.6 from 148 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 351 patrons, for a sum of $1,901 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 2049
  • Alexa (website ranking): 10690

196 comments

  1. Well done guys!
    Does releasing Mint before Christmas mean we can expect *after* Christmas some juicy news about LMDE4 ?

    1. Hi Elio,

      It’s hard to talk about LMDE 4 and Mint 20 at this stage, but part of the plan is definitely to have a short release cycle and a Christmas release for 19.3 so we can focus on the next package bases early. So no promises just yet and certainly no ETA, but we’re planning ahead and leaving time aside.

    1. I’d love the new logo as SVG, so I can pimp my wallpapers with it. 😀 But instead if sending it individually it would be simpler if we had it online so we don’t steal any team member’s valuable time with such trivial things. 🙂

  2. Sorry to hear that VLC will be thrown out, I use it as my main player.
    But like Timeshift I will delete Celluloid and install VLC.
    Yes I do not use Timeshift, I do not need it in the way I use Mint Linux as OS.
    Data is stored in the cloud and when a disk or OS fails I simply replace it by a fresh SSD or HD, I have always disks ready to use completely installed with the programs I use.
    Just swap them and in one minute back again.

    1. Yeah, I’m not happy with the disappearance of VLC, considering I rely on it for being a great player. But I will surely give the new one a try, to see what it’s capable of. What’s unclear at this moment is if VLC will be uninstalled in the process of upgrading to Mint 19.3.

      And about Timeshift, I guess it could be useful to some people to have a button to easily dismiss it as a choice for backup, even if it came with an “Are you sure?” warning that would tell you that you’re about to take your Mint experience into your own mighty hands and it will be your responsibility if you can’t revert to a working system in the absence of Timeshift snapshots. Also to be frank what I dislike the most about Timeshift is that it’s not fully integrated in the OS. The installer should actually propose a partition layout including a dedicated partition for snapshots or at least recommend the users to create one, because it’s not exactly optimal like it is right now. You end up with an installed system on your single-storage device and no dedicated room for snapshots other than the filesystem you’re trying to protect from potential issues.

    2. Hi Nick,

      Timeshift snapshots are discovered automatically from a live session, whether or not they use a dedicated partition. The advantage of not using a dedicated partition is flexibility when it comes to space usage.

      You can dismiss system reports with a click of the mouse, so Mint will warn you about it but it won’t insist if you want the warning gone.

      VLC won’t be shipped as default in new versions, but upgrading won’t remove it. I guess it could become illegible for cleaning if you use apt autoremove (since it no longer will be a dependency on mint-meta-codecs) but you can mark it as manually installed to work around that if that’s an issue for you.

    3. Hello Clem,

      thanks for the reply it´s good to hear that VLC will still be there to install.
      About Timeshift, no I don´t need it, but every time I install Linux Mint Mate, don´t like Cinnamon, I leave the users the choice and explain where it is for.
      Win10 is out with me for ever and all people that work with me know that and the reason for it, using Linux from 1999 started with BeOS.
      Mint for a long time now and support it, maybe my donations is only a drop but I hope it helps.

    4. VLC is nice, but it has freezes and occasionally crashes Cinnamon. If Celluloid resolves this then I’m all for it.

  3. Xfce will be upgraded to 4.14 \o/

    By the way, why not create Mint GNOME Edition?

    Solus OS has created Budgie desktop, but they offer GNOME as well. Zorin OS has made good tweaks on it.

    1. Hi Carlos,

      Technically we could derive Mint in as many variations as there are desktops available, but our goal isn’t to diversify and attract users with many different tastes, it’s to implement our vision, and within the feature set, performance and resource usage we have with GNOME Shell that vision is implemented with Cinnamon.

  4. Ugh, patent trolling should be illegal. >_< Don't even get me started on that subject.

    In that screenshot of Celluloid, what movie is that from? I like space movies…lol.

    I really like the new look of Grub, and the new Mint splash logo is a nice one too. Good updates all around. Mint 19.3 is going to be a great release!

    1. It looks like it’s the generic Universal intro sequence, Fuzzy Penguin. Sorry to disappoint. 🙂

    2. I’m not a lawyer, but afaik software patents as such are a [weird] concept which only exist in very few countries (Japan, USA..). I’d like to think they’d be nonsensical around here.. then again, I’m not a lawyer.

      That said, whether this attack is solid legally or not, it certainly doesn’t make any sense. My opinion is that we’re looking at a cheap attempt to make a quick buck and that the only reason GNOME was targeted wasn’t because Shotwell might be doing anything wrong, but simply because it was advertised last year that the GNOME project received million dollar donations. To me it doesn’t look like protecting intellectual property, it looks like mugging. Then again, this isn’t any truth, I’m not an expert, this is just an uninformed opinion.

  5. Curious if the plan is to eventually fork Celluloid into a new Xplayer so that aesthetic choice remains in Mint’s hands or does the Xplayer name die off in 19.2?

    1. Hi Josh,

      No, I don’t think so. Here are two reasons for this:

      – Obviously Linux Mint is more important to us than anything else, so by moving away from Xplayer we somewhat hurt Xplayer itself to make Linux Mint better. That doesn’t mean we need to kill it and it certainly doesn’t mean we have the right to deprive it of its name based on considerations which are specific to Linux Mint. I don’t know what the future of Xplayer is without the Mint user base, but at the very least we want to continue accepting bug reports, fixing things and building it so it remains available in our repositories in 19.x and 20.x. If for any reasons we wanted to start a new media player in the scope of Xapps we surely could find a new name (Flix maybe? I don’t know).

      – We fork for a reason, and when we fork something we usually do it as a last resort, because what we need won’t happen, because it’s too big to just patch and because it’s too important for us to ignore. Celluloid already fits almost perfectly into Linux Mint. Its developer already is open to pleasing a variety of user bases (you can see this in Celluloid design choices such as its change of name from gnome-mpv to Celluloid, or the fact that it lets you decide whether or not to use CSD, or dark theme variants). He’s also active and open to changes. We asked Celluloid to use generic menu items and that was accepted. We improved French translations and that got in quite quickly. It looks like a serious project which is run with pragmatism and wants to be compatible with many environments. So with that in mind, our interests align and by using this software we can contribute to making it better and it can improve the user experience in our distribution.

  6. Love the name for LM 19.3 — for me, “Tricia” will always be Tricia Helfer, of “Battlestar Galactica” fame.

  7. So on a fresh install of Linux Mint 19.3 will we have to use Flatpack in order to get VLC 3.0.8 or will it still be in the repository? I highly dislike the constant updating of both Flatpack and Snap, so could someone PLEASE make an Appimage of VLC 3.0.8 instead of the current 2.2.8 image 🙂

  8. I admit VLC has caused me problems, it freezes cinnamon at times but I still use it as my default media player and absolutely love it. Will be extremely sad to see it get replaced by celluloid. Nevertheless hope its still available in the repos, and we could get it from there as I have no idea what celluloid has to offer.

    Extremely happy that the new version will ship with the 5.0 kernel. Thats great news. Overall cant wait for the new release.

  9. Hello Clem,

    I’m happy to read you.

    I am wholeheartedly with the GNOME Foundation, I dare to hope that they are going to attack and demand damages for abusive claims in court, damage to reputation, more legal costs and lawyers, etc.

    They should offer support via PayPal on this page :

    https://secure.givelively.org/donate/gnome-foundation-inc/gnome-patent-troll-defense-fund

    I like really the New splash screens were made for Grub it’s graphically excellent. But for my VLC is a reference in terms of compatibility with different audio / video formats, this software is totally essential for me under Linux.

    I would like you to integrate the necessary codecs so that SoundConverter for Gnome can work with the AAC format under Linux Mint 19.3 as it is able to do it under LMDE 3.

    The integration of the automatic update of Applets / Themes / Deskjets / Extentions, natively under Linux Mint (without Spices Update) would be welcome, for a better management of the integrity of the system.

    I hope that LMDE 4 is also coming soon and that the pace of release of future LMDE 5, 6, etc. will be closer to the future of Debian. Ideally, we would like LMDE Beta at the same time as Debian Beta.

    I wish you an excellent continuation.

    Regards

    1. Thanks Philippe,

      The other link mentioned in the article accepts Paypal donations.

      LMDE is a strategic project, it’s not a priority.

      We’ll need to talk with Claudiux to integrate the update applet into Cinnamon core. I also think it’s a good idea.

      VLC isn’t going anywhere. It just won’t be installed by default, that’s all. You’ll still have it in the repositories and Software Manager.

      I’m not sure which codec is missing for the sound converter? If you can identify the necessary package we can make sure it’s pulled along with mint-meta-codecs.

    2. Yes I know we can always add VLC, beginners who test Mint should more easily adopt your OS if you provide basic VLC.

      Best regards.

  10. Good news, new grub and Mint icon make Mint look more modern…. And, as others, I hope VLC won’t disappear from repositories. Celluloid might be fine indeed, but it’s good to have a choice.

    1. VLC won’t disappear from the Repositorys. It is now not installed by default. That’s it! 🙂

    1. ooh… that involves changing the way that gst package is built. We don’t pin that, this should be requested in Ubuntu directly. Out of curiosity, which audio codec is problematic, and what codecs are you trying to convert from and to?

      We recently noticed new Samsung smart TVs could not longer play DST audio and started working on a nemo smart action, so if you right-clicked on a movie using DST audio, you’d see a menu item to convert it to AAC. Is that relevant or is your use case different?

    2. Hello Clem,

      As a former musician, I am a music lover and I like to take my music collection everywhere with me.

      My ripped CD’s represent +/- 250 Gb in Wave format, +/- 130 Gb in Flac format.

      The SD memory card that my phone can read is limited up to 128Gb maximum. Recently, my Flac music collection no longer has enough room on my SD card.

      The format OGG @ 500 Kb/s is an alternative of excellent quality, but is not natively supported by my car stereo, which is why I need to convert my music library to AAC @ 320 Kb/s which is of slightly lower quality but natively supported.

      I’m embarrassed to have to tinker Mint to make AAC transcodage working and have to redo it with each new version of Mint, every 6 months. For now I still have an old LMDE 3 installation on my machine that I use to for troubleshoot when I need it, I use it in this situation. Ideally I I would like to be able to recover this disk for an other utilisations.

      LMDE based directly on Debian has a much higher potential than Mint 19.x based on Ubuntu for the user I am. I understand that most users have their habits with 19.x and that’s why you prefer this OS rather than LMDE. Anyway I think that if you publicly publish these two OS, they both have to benefit from the same publication / maintenance rhythms. I hope that abandoning 32-bit versions and desktop environments other than Cinnamon / Mate / XFCE will give you more time for that. I will be you grateful 🙂

      The only advantage for my I see in Ubuntu is its recent kernels that easily adapt to new systems that have just come out in the trade. LMDE allows us greater freedom of creation and no longer be considered a subset of Ubuntu. It just lacks a native driver graphics manager to make installation easier for beginners. I will be you, I will seriously think of getting rid of Ubuntu to become a distribution “a little freer” than you are now.

      I wish you the best for the future.

      Best regards

    3. PS Where on the Ubuntu website can we ask for the addition of the packets for the native processing of AAC encoding for SoundConverter ??

    4. Hi Philippe,

      As a bug on launchpad.net against the gstreamer package. It looks like all they need is to add libfaac-dev as a build dependency? Give them as much info and links as possible.

  11. A lot of nice stuff.. as always! 😉
    Somewhat sad about Xplayer – liked it’s design but mpv is pretty good as a backend… so why not?
    Grinding my teeth a little over Gnotes – I get the pros, but no tray-icon plus the annoying guess-which-menu-is-hidden-behind-which-icon design… not a fan to be honest.
    Well, I at least can stand with the Gnome folks against the patent trolls. Nice to see people sticking together for the right reasons.

    1. Gnote can use a titlebar instead of CSD. I don’t recommend it because I don’t think it actually looks better (it doesn’t use a menubar no matter what), but it is configurable.

  12. For you, LMDE is a strategic project, not a priority.
    But it is a priority for users who wait for a long time in LMDE4.
    Not a strategic project.

    1. That’s a problem we address with communication. The best way we address that gap in expectation is by being clear and transparent about our goals and vision, and it’s what we’re doing here when we make such statements.

    2. Personally I prefer that the versions of Mint 19.x & LMDE in 32 bits versions disappear and let exclusivement the 64-bit version continue to exist. No more people or almost use in end 2019 a CPU mainstream dating back to before 2005 based based on 32-bit technology.

      So Clem would have more time for LMDE 4, a faster publication than expected could then take place 🙂

    3. Like Clem said, LMDE is a strategic project.
      This is free software we’re talking about.
      Also, it was always clear that this was a strategic project, not the main focus.
      I’m sure Clem and the Mint Team are glad that so many people enjoy LMDE, but we need to keep our expectations realistic. There are no resources for everything. Therefore choices have to be made.

    4. They dont have time cause resources are wasted on ten times same crap like this video thingy and other xgarbage…Look at how it took them to change their logo and boot screen lol. There s an updated version on LMDE on linuxmintusers.de.

  13. The new applications look good. If I install them now from Software Manager, will I get the right versions? Will they be automatically replaced by LM 19.3?

  14. Celluloid player? For what?
    There are already bomi who is a graphical user interface(GUI) player based on mpv for Linux. He is a very good player with many options who has been abandoned for many years and deserves the chance to be taken over by a developer

    1. It’s the only linux player that can set the subtitle position anywhere (one row on the image and one on the black band) and has a thumbnail preview in the progress bar, which is essential in 2019

    2. Bomi it’s the only linux video player that has many features and settings specific to a modern player.

  15. I have never liked VLC and xplayer but I think at the moment, mpv is a player too rudimentary and lacking absolutely necessary options for a modern player. Bomi is much more evolved. The mpv developer should study and draw inspiration from Daum Potplayer which is a worthy player of 2019.
    Sorry for my english. Is google translate.

    1. I’ve tried Yumi Uefi and MultiBootUSB. Only a few of the Linux distributions would boot. Is there a program out there that reside on the USB then boot from the ISO image? Or partition a USB stick like a hard drive so each distribution has its own mount point? Trying some VirtualBox, VMware, and Qemu for the first time too.

  16. Hello, new Mint user here! Just took the plunge and switched from Win7 finally.
    Mint is really awesome! I customized every tiny detail to perfection.
    I’d like to dip my toes into some Cinnamon development, but I need some help!
    Let me explain.

    I noticed there was no option for an “Empty Trash” sound effect in Sound Settings.
    After a lot of searching I found a hacky solution with a bash script that I added to my Startup Applications, but it’s obviously not a desirable solution:

    #!/bin/bash
    cd /home/yourusername/.local/share/Trash/files
    while true
    do
    TOT1=”$(ls -1 | wc -l)”
    sleep 1
    TOT2=”$(ls -1 | wc -l)”
    if [ “$TOT1” -gt “$TOT2” ];
    then
    mplayer /home/yourusername/Sounds/trash.mp3
    fi
    done

    I noticed that my /usr/share/mint-artwork/sounds has 14 sound files in it, including one trash.oga.
    However my Sounds settings only display 13 options, which all work correctly and play the sounds.
    I thought that was very weird, maybe something the devs planned for a later release, or simply forgot? Or not very important?

    I thought that since the other 13 are already implemented it would be easy to implement the Empty Trash sound option too, and it would be a gentle way for me to get started in Cinnamon development.
    I browsed the code in GitHub and the only explicitly relevant thing I could find was in here:
    https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/blob/master/js/ui/soundManager.js
    The _init function has a field this.keys that lists the 13 sound effect options.

    I have read the docs and downloaded and installed the dev tools from here:
    https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    But I’m really confused; would the relevant functionality be in cinnamon-control-center, cinnamon-settings-daemon, CJS, or all of the above?
    It would be really great if someone could point me in the right direction.
    Also it would be great if I could find the code that implements the other 13 sounds so I can use them as an example.
    I feel like this should be an easy thing to do, but it’s too hard for me ATM.

    1. Hi,

      You would need to add the configuration option in cinnamon (in cinnamon-settings’s cs_sounds.py to be precise) but actually play that sound in nemo.

  17. Very happy to see the new version of XFCE coming – and the new kernel, of course. Thank you for all your work!

    But I doubt that replacing VLC as standard player is an good idea, to be honest. VLC is much more than just a simple media player. It is the swiss army knife of media. We are using it for creating streams, cropping and resizing videos, transcoding / re-encoding media and a lot more. And for most usecases it is more convenient than using ffmpeg, etc. on the command line all the time.

    So I am sorry: In case Celluloid is just a simple media player and can not offer all the great features of VLC, we will stay with VLC.

    By the way: Just donated for GNOME. Hope these problems with the patent troll is fixed soon.

  18. Hi Clem

    Many thanks for bringing the gnome issue to our attention, and thanks also for including a “pay by paypal” link as this is not offered on the original gnome link. Donation made. It is very important that this is fought successfully

    Also thanks to you and the team for the great work in continuing to improve Mint, much appreciated

  19. Actually Fedora has Cinnamon spin and I think it is pretty good base (even not stability champion), so losing ubuntu base there is some sort of a choice.

  20. Hi Clem,
    After using Linux mint for 7 years I have been switching to LMDE3 for half a year now, it is much better than expected, fast and stable and I am curious about LMDE4. I hope it will someday become the main OS.

    1. No need to wait, just use it as your default. also check out the comunity versions at linuxmintusers.de

    1. While I like that one, I have to agree with some other posters who wonder why so much time is spent on things like logos and low-impact eye candy.

  21. Hi Clem,

    I have a few requests if it is possible and if you could implement them in the upcoming release. First one, please add the ‘noatime, discard’ flags to the fstab file for partitions on SSD by default, this is to reduce writes on SSD.
    Second, please if possible include kernel 5.3 also so that LM supports newer hardware, it’s necessary to support the ‘function + esc’/hotkeys key combination on laptops.
    Third, please do look into cpu governor/usage which causes continuous high temperature of the system. In my testing I found this issue is not present in debian10 and manjaro. However it’s present in Ubuntu and LM. I think these would be helpful to many people who have the newest hardware and looking to use LM as their primary OS.

    Thanks.

    1. I agree re noatime, i always add it manually for my SSDs. I know Clem wrote 19.3 will ship with kernel 5.0 but I have a brand new machine that needs kernel 5.3 also to work, so currently I am running the latest Ubuntu. I was expecting to wait until LM20 comes out next summer before I could install it on that machine, but would obviously prefer to be able to run LM sooner if possible 🙂

    2. Panks… Can you pass this or similar like a kernel parameter? Otherwise it is somewhat useless, as in most computers O/S root is SSD and the larger data HDD is a standard one.

  22. Hi
    I am using 19.2 XFCE. Love it. I think october was very busy for you guys. So many improvement plus XFCE 4.14. Waiting for 19.3. Thanks a lot for this amazing distribution.

  23. I actually like the new proposed circular Mint logo ( ^^)
    Had I inspired anyone? Sweet-
    Even as a qualified professional Linux user, Linux Mint is my go to.
    Thank you really much for your work!

  24. hey i just wanted to make a post about an issue i’ve been having with blue tooth on cinnamon 19.2. i have a HP pavilion 17 it’s about 6 years old. the chip set is AMD, i have it paired with my bluetooth sony WH-CH700N headphones. in the beginning the sound is great at boot up but after a few min’s it get’s worse (first the bass start’s to fade out), then after an hour or so it sound like it’s playing music through a pipe. after that i try to disconnect and reconnect bluetooth and headphone’s. the headphone’s will not pair again most of the time. i try a reboot on my P.C and it dosen’t seem to alway’s fix the issue, is there something i can try to fix this issue or is this a known issue?

  25. Love pix, use it all the time. I have noticed that some files, having certain (xmp?) data tags, trigger the creation of .comments and xml files under that folder when viewed. Is there (please) any way to maybe (pretty please) have an option / extension in pix that prevents / suppresses the creation of .comments? I would use this feature so I don’t get these .comments hidden folders all over the place. These .comments are like plastic soda bottles in a pristine lake, don’t like to find any files I did not create.

    1. Hi Pete,

      Looking at the code it seems to come from the “Comments and Tags” extension. Try to disable it in Edit -> Preferences -> Extensions.

  26. Great work Clem/ team,
    I just wanted to say that the replacement of VLC & Tomboy is great move. For one thing, the menus in VLC looked weird relative to other programs, and there is nothing wrong with being able to install it from the repositories if needed. Likewise replacing Tomboy with Gnote so we can remove Mono, its a very positive step to remove extraneous dependencies. Keep it simple. Most of us want a slim OS, one that is fast and responsive.

    A bit like how i wanted a program similar to MS Paint, Gimp was way over complicated and cluttered, Gpaint in Github was not great, Pinta and Krita weren’t great, Kolourpaint4 was the best but had too many dependencies. Thankfully we have one that will work in Linux Mint through Firefox https://jspaint.app/. Feels just like Ms Paint 🙂

    1. Gerry – I came across MyPaint in the flathub a while ago which may be of interest to you.

  27. I would like to see a graphical utility someday that will list all human readable configuration files in /etc and function similar to how registry editor in Windows does. This will make changing settings in /etc more unified and easier instead of having to open nano in terminal or xed graphical text editor to edit human readable configuration files. 🙂

  28. Even though Mint 19.3 will ship with kernel 5.0, will it be possible to use a 4.15 kernel? I use qemu extensively, and the the way I have things configured (i.e., it just works!), it won’t work with 4.18, and though I haven’t tried, I doubt it will work with 5.0.

  29. As much as I hate having to donate to Gnome, I will do so for Linux Mint’s sake. Gnome devs don’t do right by the community. Linux Mint, however, does.

  30. LMDE3 worked good for about a month, then the USB image writer quit working. When I clicked on write image then Downloads folder, the downloaded ISO did not show up but it was there when I went to the home folder and clicked on downloads.

  31. Hi Clem

    I am already using MPV media player as my default media player for video. I also use VLC as my default media player for audio/music. I don’t know when Celluloid will be pushed to us LMDE users through update manager, and when it does, would there be any problems if MPV media player is already installed? Once I see both these MPV players installed on my computer, I may uninstall MPV if I prefer to stay with Culluloid only.

    By the way, one important feature that the MPV player lacks (which is an option in VLC) is the ability to force the subtitle position so that you could place subtitles so they would perfectly appear with one line on the video and one line on the black bar below the video on ultra wide movies. If the MPV project won’t implement this feature in the original player, then this would certainly be a welcome feature in Celluloid.

    About Tomboy vs Gnote

    Will notes made in Tomboy automatically carry over to Gnote or do we need to make a backup (Tomboy has a backup feature of notes)?

    About the lack of priority by the Linux Mint team to towards keeping LMDE up to date, I have already voiced my oponion before, but I agree with a user above that it would be a good idea to let go of 32-bit versions of Linux Mint and focus on keeping both LM main version and LMDE up to date with recent kernal versions and as recent software packages as possible as soon as new stable version of Debian have been released.

    If you buy a new laptop, you don’t want to wait 4 years before all hardware is working properly..

    1. You mention Pix above as one of the X-apps in connection with Gnome vs Patent Trolls.

      In LMDE there was an app called gThumb installed which can be used for minor image editing such as cropping. gThumb was removed when you released LMDE 3 and instead Pix was introduced. Pix is a part of Xapps. After upgrading to LMDE 3, I spent a few minutes comparing Pix with gThumb. To me gThumb appeared to be a bit more intuitiv than Pix, so I uninstalled Pix.

      For example, after cropping an image in gThumb, you simple click Accept which appear in a green Mint-like colour and then Save and you’re done.

      I think gThumb should again replace Pix when LMDE 4 is released.

  32. Hi everyone !

    I’m still running LM18.3 Sylvia XFCE and I’m very fine with it, but from what I understand it seems it will be obsolete soon. So, should I upgrade now to 19.3, or should I wait for the release of the new LM20 (since it will use brand new kernels if I understand well)? Thank you in advance for your answers. Regards

    1. Hi,
      Officially LM18.3 will be supported till April 2021. So, if you are very fine with it … you can install and try LM19.3 on a separate partition. I have LM18.3 alongside LM19.2 XFCE and both are doing fine on my hardware (with kernel 4.15 as well as kernel 5.3) .

    2. Although 18.3 is supported for a while longer, if you plan to stick with the same installation into the future I would recommend getting onboard with 19.x sooner:
      1. Upgrading 18.3 to 19 is natively supported in the update manager, but so far as I am aware 18.3 to 20 won’t be.
      2. As you may be aware, upgrading major versions (18.x to 19.x) is a major upgrade, whereas upgrading minor versions (19.1 -> 19.2 -> 19.3) is trivial.
      3. Once you’re on 19, upgrading to 19.3 (via 19.1, 19.2) is really simple, quick and shouldn’t require further backups beyond those you did before the 19 upgrade.
      4. You’ll need to be on 19.3 to upgrade to 20 using the built-in tools.
      5. Mint 19.3 has so many small improvements from 18.3. Lots of bugs are fixed, tools are more reliable, the UI is nicer and performance is improved.
      6. You’ll be in a familiar place. Mint’s improvements are generally incremental, they’re not reinventing wheels!

      If you choose to go down the upgrade path, do make sure to take appropriate backups of your system, manually, with Timeshift, or both. And also be sure to backup your /home folder(s).

      If on the other hand you’re not invested in your installation and were planning to start afresh anyway, I’d recommend sticking with 18.3 until 20 comes out. Then backup your home folder & data, wipe everything, install afresh and restore bits and pieces from your home folders (Documents, Pictures etc.)

  33. Clem,

    Thanks for the update. I installed Linux Mint in a dual boot setup a couple of months ago and love it! I regret not moving to Linux sooner :/ I’ve been a long time Windows user and found the transition to Linux seamless thanks to your excellent distro. Many thanks to yourself and the Mint crew 🙂

    I sincerely hope the Gnome Foundation is successful in their endeavors.

    I have been a long time VLC user having used it in Windows for many years but will have to get used to Celluloid once I make the update. I can always go back to VLC if I want to so no major problems either way as I see it.

    1. You won’t get much help here. Go to the Linux Mint forums, register, and post a support thread for further assistance. Also, when you do, be very specific as to what you’re dealing with. Nobody can help you when all you say is “Linux Mint won’t install”. You need to be descriptive as to what you’re seeing on your end and the steps you took to produce that error. Thanks~

    1. Mint is largely based on Ubuntu LTS versions (currently, Mint 19.x is based on Ubuntu 18.04), so I would doubt that the Mint developers would consider implementing a version of Python that was different than the one used by the base Ubuntu version, as this could prove quite messy. Ubuntu 20.04, on which Mint 20 will be based, is currently being developed with Python 3.8 as its default Python 3 version, so this should also be the case for Mint 20 (you’re probably looking at June 2020, or thereabouts, as the release date for Mint 20).

      In saying that, you could look at pyenv in the meantime for switching between multiple versions of Python3.

      I apologise if I have any of this info wrong – if I do, hopefully one of the Mint developers will be along to correct me.

  34. Has the fullscreen problem (missing sliver across bottom and down right side) been fixed that I reported when 19.2 came out? There was a response that it was brought up in a video review for 19.2 that it would be looked in to. I ended up switching to Manjaro since no fix came, but ended up with the same bug there as I chose Cinnamon release.

    1. Hello Brad

      The LM19 is better than the LM19.2 on the Cinnamon version.
      LM19 uses Cinnamon 3.8.9,
      I tried LM19.2 is not very useful on Cinnamon,
      Currently I use LM19, LM19 is an excellent operating system.
      I hope you will try LM19 again and it will be much better.
      Good luck

  35. Linux Mint has taken over my Windows 7,8 &10.. There is no better OS than Linux!
    No cracking Windows anymore ;).
    Do only thing i really need to to some day is donate! 😉

    Keep Going Strong!

  36. Think VLC should definitely remain in Mint 19.3 and Timeshift should be an optional download choice.

    Personally I am suspicious of the whole “cloud” thing on security/privacy grounds.

    Also, backing iup my entire hard drive weekly to a flash drive using Clonezilla fully meets my emergency restore needs.

    As I have suggested in the past I wish the clean installation routine give me options as to what gets written to my system.

    Sometimes “less is more,” so I have been using Mint 17.3 for years and may stick with it even after support ceases.

    1. @Scott
      Timeshift does not permit saving to a cloud/remote/network location, if that is what you are saying. Only local devices with Linux file systems.

  37. Speaking of GRUB2, are you planning to add a front-end for easy configuration and handling of boot options at some point? I am using Grub-customizer, but it seems it is not well appreciated by everyone (and perhaps its development has been discontinued), a standard configuration option for Linux Mint would be a great thing to have.

    1. I also use grub-customizer, which still sucks, but is a lot better than nothing. It’d be nice if there was a real WYSIWYG grub editor out there. Or if someone just fixed grub-customizer.

      My only other beefs are all weird software issues. Like it’s hard to install the best emulators, there’s no PPA or repos for a lot of them.

      Of course I’m working on my own OS now, so….. http://supermox.me

  38. All excellent news! The updates to XFCE are particularly welcome alongside Cinnamon and Mate. Looking forward to the new release 🙂

  39. Focusing on more CHOICES for Cinnamon

    I’d like to see the Mint Team drop the other two DEs that are done by so many others and focus more on Cinnamon. Please consider the following releases and reasons:

    Linux Mint LTS (as done now, no changes)
    Linux Mint “Fresh” (a rolling release for hardware aficionados and folks who like to have the latest software versions) This would help win back folks who left for Manjaro and Tumbleweed.
    Linux Mint Debian Edition (answers the most commonly asked question: when is the next release?)

    1. Rolling releases with Mint? I do not think that will ever happen. Arch/Manjaro Cinnamon is about as best you’ll get for that.

      Personally, I’d rather see Cinnamon decoupled from all of the technologies that hold it back >as far as packages go (such as Xorg)< but we won't see that happening either any time soon. Cinnamon would go back to being a DE that could be run on most distros without modifications and there would be no point then to support a distro wrapped around it.

      I'd also like to see Wayland, but their Git maintainers have said to screw off asking for Wayland. I'm forced to use non-Cinnamon distros because I have a 4K display and Gnome (Cinnamon in this case) can't handle floats for DPI, only integers. 1.5f would be sublime. Trying to migrate to KDE but some apps are still Gtk. Bit of a pain keeping Gtk and Qt looking the same.

    2. The Linux Mint team only answers questions that are convenient for them and focuses on bullshit such as Logo, Icons etc. I won’t mention the cardinal errors in LM. For me, like the login screen does not work 100%. As I asked, I haven’t received an answer yet. And they still deal with bullshit. But I appreciate the huge amount of work they have devoted so far. I mention that I have been using Mint for several years. But for me, the system is supposed to work and not focus on non-important elements like Logo. Best regards.

  40. Hi Clem, just a little shout out to you and the team. I made a contribution by way of some bugfixing on mintUpdate (PR #82 + some IRC chats) and, though I’ve been quiet and busy with other work, I’m still actively using, supporting, promoting and recommending LM in SW-UK, and hoping to make more code contributions next year. Looking forward to 20, keep up the good work!

  41. Hi, I am happy with 19.2 mate edition on 3 family computers, its just one of them /main one/ has not working mint update – it says no new updates – while using console apt upgrade works OK. 2 PCs are on 5.x kernel using AMD 580 cards and main one using NVIDIA on 4.15 kernel. Most WIn games working using Lutris/DXVK, even THe Outer WOrlds and latest Rockstar preload launcher for RDR 2. Thanks for all your work.

  42. Thanks Mark Walton,
    I just tried MyPaint, and like the others it is difficult to just select a piece of text/image and move it around the screen.

    Clem,
    I looked at the interface for that
    https://github.com/maoschanz/drawing/blob/master/docs/screenshots/cinnamon.png
    The once concern that i have is that there is a row of icons, (Open, Save, Save, Print etc) which could be included under the File menu instead of taking up the vertical space of the screen.
    Likewise, the font options and preview buttons on the bottom bar, the font options could be included under the Edit menu or on the left tool bar, and Preview included under the File menu.
    I know this is a third party application, but it is a pity that they seem to forget that when editing images on laptops, every bit of vertical space is key.

    1. Mint ran on 4.15 for some time despite it not being an LTS mainline kernel. Mainline LTS went 4.14, 4.19, while Mint went 4.15, 4.18, 5.0. They maintain their own (Ubuntu) kernels and back port when necessary. 4.15 was EOL some time ago but Mint still continues to get 4.15 updates, and I would assume 19.3 will see the same for kernel 5.0.

  43. So on Mint Cinnamon 19.2 x64 I’ve opened GNOME-terminal, issued “df” command, installled “Celluloid” in Software Manager (only Flatpak version available) and after this again entered “df” command in terminal.

    According to “df” output difference, disk space taken by installation of this one app is… 1782 MiB – WTF?!
    I thought that some demo movie is included with app but I cannot find anywhere…

    Xplayer, GNOME-mpv (looks like this Celluloid), Smplayer, much more powerful VLC. … – what is the point of reinventing the wheel?

  44. Hello, I’ve just discovered some bug in Nemo (v.19.1). When I choose the option ‘arrange items’ from the right-click menu, it doesn’t display folders and files properly when the order is ‘by type’ and ‘by size’. The ‘manually’ option shows all files stacked one upon another with all their names in one place… Strange I haven’t found it before… Probably didn’t try to use the options.

  45. SMPlayer on top of MPV might be a better choice. The current version, 19.10, uses MPV by default, and SMPlayer seems to be much further along in development than Celluloid.

    I want to thank everyone at Linux Mint for making it possible for me to finally (more than two decades) leave Windows as my native OS. I now have Windows on a virtual machine instead of it being the other way around. On my desktop, Windows is now Linux’s beech… 😀

    I feel very comfortable with installing LM for a mainstream customer and supporting it. Indeed, I am now recommending it.

    THANK YOU 🙂

  46. Please make 5.3.x the default kernel of Tricia. We need it for recent hardware support (AMD Ryzen)….
    Great that Mono won’t be part of Tricia! Looking forward to an excellent new release. 🙂

    1. We had updated a HP Stream’s Linux Kernel from 4.15 to 5.3 and it was unable to boot. Not sure if the our suggestion to have the default Linux Kernel be 5.3 is a wise choice.

      Seems that 4.15 breaks one computer while 5.3 breaks another computer.

      Is there any way this can be easily solved?

      Sorry for the noise.

      Thank you

    2. Hi Ovari,

      It’s hit and miss unfortunately. We’re aware of idle sound issues in 5.0 for instance. The fact that LTS is there in 19.2 and the upgrade from 19.2 to 19.3 is really easy makes it easier for us to recommend HWE. I’ve personally tested many exotic components with 5.0 and we’re quite happy to go with it at this stage.

      It happens often that new series aren’t fully supported when they come out in Ubuntu.. (broadcom, vbox, nvidia, etc..). it’s a bit early to know for sure but it’s more likely we’ll ship with 5.0 (current HWE) than 5.3.

  47. mpv is my favourite video player, but as far as I recall, unlike vlc, it does not use hardware acceleration by default. are you planning to enable hardware acceleration?

    1. Alex ; I personally prefer SMPlayer paired with mpv and then turn on ‘cuda’ for GPU accelerated video playback if you got a NVIDIA GPU. for SMPlayer go to… Options > Preferences > Performance > Decoding > Hardware Decoding and switch it to ‘cuda’. that seems to work well and cut back on CPU use when playing general x264 video files.

  48. I maybe too late but for the musicians, for Philippe first, I’d recommend to use the original codec which is a part of I tunes.
    It can be used in wine to convert to aac very easily, and in batch mode, if to open the audio files with this script:
    #!/bin/sh
    mkdir ./M4A
    wine ~/.wine/drive_c/qaac/qaac64.exe –tvbr 127 -q 2 -d M4A “$1”
    exit 0
    I recall there were some articles how to unpack the latest apple package as a part of freely distributed tunes app, make all this work, and place the necessary *.dll files into the wine folder properly.
    It works like a charm.
    I tested many codecs a couple of years ago. Faac was not even close to qaac by quality then…

  49. Over the years I’ve found a few things annoying about VLC (mainly its UI) but I’m very unimpressed with the simple minded, typically gnome-shell, Celluloid UI. I use the uPnP (DLNA) capability of VLC and I don’t think mpv supports that feature.
    Ditto on the kernel support; I just upgraded to a last gen AMD Raven Ridge CPU and need a newer supported kernel than the prehistoric v4.15.

    1. I agree, the UI of the stable version of VLC is getting more and more annoying to me too. But the future versions of VLC would have already a new UI that’s real impressive. I saw it in the development version of VLC, buggy and not working properly in summer yet.
      But we should give Celluloid a chance and test how good it navigates the BD menu of either a hard BD or it’s *.iso file. And test the on the fly filtering: de-interlacing of the interlaced material, and that’s most important the adaptive interlaced (MAFF) video streams, that requires doubling the frame rate on the fly, and such the basic filters as de-banding, and adding the dispersed sand to up to 4K video streams. These are the basic and quite simple for VLC tasks. Let’ see…

  50. Replace VLC with Celluloid? OK, fine as long as VLC can still be installed.
    Replace Xplayer with Celluloid? Why? No! Please keep it!

    Now to other matters, I have been thinking, since Debian already ships with KDE, wouldn’t it be a piece of cake for developers to make another LMDE version with KDE? After all, they have given up in giving us regular Linux Mint with KDE, I really wish KDE version came back.

    1. I agree with you about the media players! I wouldn’t mind VLC being replaced with Celluloid. (Plus, it’s a popular multi-platform player, so no chance of it being abandoned.) But Xplayer is irreplaceable to me!

  51. I recently purchased an Intel NUC8i7HVKVA and found that Linux Mint 19 will not install. I tried several other distros including feren OS Cinnamon. They all installed flawlessly. Linux Mint gives me the message, “unknown controller 3” and a locked up black screen. My work around has been the OEM installation but this has its problems. It doesn’t give one any messages when various downloads are completed. It may have problems once installed. I have finally got Mint Cinnamon 19.2 working well. I am using feren OS Cinnamon as a backup.

    I am wondering if this problem can be fixed in the version 19.3 I have been with Linux Mint since its inception and love Cinnamon.

  52. First Of All Celluloid the problem with it is there is no way to adjust aspect ratio
    that is the main problem with it and another annoying problem with all media players except parole media player is the ability to show and support visualizations when listening to music with the others you stare at a black screen Celluloid aka videos aka totem used to have that visualizations feature but dropped it
    parole media player is a great player for audio files i like it because i can see the GOOM What is GOOM Visualizations
    it however is not the best for videos VLC Works just fine For Videos for me

  53. I,am still wondering if the regression in libsane is fixed yet
    the regression is vertical bands in scanned documents
    Clem could you let me know please
    I,am just curious
    19.3 sounds like a fine release i will gladly upgrade when it comes out
    and there is nothing wrong with not including VLC in the default install since anyone that likes it will just install it anyway
    best of luck to you all you people are awesome keep up the exceptional work
    i tell people about linuxmint all the time how reliable and cool it is

  54. i installed gnote from the repositories how do i remove mono without removing pinta it seems some apps like pinta still depend on it and sysinfo depends on it as well
    in order to run some games you need binfmt support The binfmt_misc kernel module
    just to let you know

  55. @ Clem

    “We’ll need to talk with Claudiux to integrate the update applet into Cinnamon core. I also think it’s a good idea.”

    Great! I definitely appreciate this decision of yours. Could you also consider talking to the developer of the Transparent Panels-extension and integrate it sooner or later, too?

    Kind regards,

  56. Hi Clem,
    it would be nice to have a program that takes care of the complete uninstallation of folders, files and dependencies now useless, without having to do it manually. Usually, I do this using synaptic, but there are still many elements scattered here and there. I like to have an operating system that is always free of elements that only take up space on the PC. Does it already exist or could it be a good idea to create it and make it available to us ordinary users? Thanks.

    1. I wonder if GtkOrphan (found in Synaptic Package Manager) may go some way toward meeting your requirements Gian.

    1. Do all old apps work with Wayland? I don’t know much about it, but I think I had read that it is not compatible with too many old applications. For example the classic Synaptic package manager is still relevant (and I would say critical) but I have heard it doesn’t work or can’t be installed on systems that come with Wayland.
      https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/issues/15

  57. There was a bug introduced into Cinnamon 19.0 which still exists, time to fix it now please. It is that the Desktop icons for system functions move around on the desktop by themselves at will, e.g. Trash, Home, Computer. This happens usually on system boot. A workaround is to have these icons not located near user added desktop icons, at least then they can move around, but not end up being on top of user arranged icons.

  58. Hi Clem and other from LM Team. Can you please consider, when the File manager Nemo is open in two panels (usually for copy/paste), when I copy one object and in other panel give the right click of the mouse, the paste menu to appear? For now, it takes two long steps. First to make active right panel, and then its allow to paste. Thank you very much. Greetings from Bulgaria.

  59. I like Xplayer much more than Celluloid! I like that it has the same large, easy to see window borders/control buttons that I set up in my system settings. I also like that it is much easier to get to all the menu options and also quickly close the program. It seems light on resources, plays everything perfectly, and unlike Celluloid, Xplayer has never frozen on me. (With Celluloid, I’ve repeatedly had to right-click the taskbar icon to close the frozen program.)

    I was a long-time VLC user (my primary player for about a decade), but since switching from Windows 7 to Linux Mint, I ended up uninstalling VLC because Xplayer is so much nicer. I never thought I would move on from VLC, and now I’m really sad to read that Xplayer will no longer be part of the installation package. I’m worried about what that will mean for it in the future.

    As a new user, it was very appealing to have both VLC and Xplayer installed out of the box – VLC for familiarity and compatible formats and Xplayer because it’s so nice, clean, light and reliable!

    Are there any other distros that feature Xplayer? Any other popular distros that will help ensure that it continues to be supported? (Or is it Linux Mint’s baby?) I prefer Linux Mint, but a reliable media player is a big consideration for me, and Celluloid is a huge step down from Xplayer IMO. I’m so disappointed.

    On a positive note, I do like that you’re removing Tomboy Notes and Mono. I removed them both a while back, but it’s probably best (and more secure) to just include Gnote instead.

  60. Sorry but you are doing a bad job in terms of “security updates”.

    How dare you propose the 5.0 kernel on Mint 19.3 which will be released in December when this kernel will no longer be supported under Ubuntu from January 2020, i.e. only 1 month after the release of Mint 19.3!
    Or you do as under Ubuntu cad that the kernel will automatically pass from 5.0 to 5.3 but it is a big mistake if you stay on branch 5.0 on kernel on 19.3.

    Otherwise another criticism about LMDE this time: I don’t think you know the Debian distribution at all, you’re totally unaware of the delays, are you aware that Debian 10 packages are already old? and you still haven’t released a version based on them? that’s nonsense, you handle the releases very badly !
    You had to release LMDE 4 when Debian 10 started to be stable i.e. BEFORE July 2019 (Debian is not Ubuntu, even 5 months before the release, Debian is already stable !), you manage your Debian edition very, very badly. As a result, LMDE is of no use with such a delay.

    That’s too bad, Cinnamon’s pretty well designed for that.

    Rather than doing a Debian Edition, do a Mint Arch Edition, at least you won’t have to worry about releases anymore….

    1. Sorry but you’re talking nonsense.

      – We ship with HWE. Today that’s 5.0, tomorrow that’s something else. If you’re in between LTS and HWE, you’ll be given HWE as an update.

      – LMDE is a fallback plan. If we spend all our time on it we fail our main mission.

      – Rolling bases, no thanks. Some people enjoy it, but it’s not what we do here.

    2. I agree with Clem on this.
      I don’t think Linux Mint will satisfy you, ever. The Linux Mint goals are not what you think they are

      perhaps you should try Debian. Stable is good, so is Testing, and even Sid is usable.
      —-
      If you are challenged setting up Debian try the Siduction operating system [https://news.siduction.org/] (or google it and see some reviews )
      It has a simple installer and is actively maintained and gets “the very latest and greatest”… with Debian Sid as a base. I think it is kinda fun, but not my personal cup of tea.

  61. After accepting the suggested update to the Update Manager today, November 13, the Update Manager appears with everything greyed — nothing works! The problem may be compounded by the fact that one of the updates that was installed (along with the update to the Update Manager itself) was to the latest update to the 5.0 Linux Kernel.

    I hope someone will come up with a solution to this (these) problem(s).

    1. Hi Ronald,

      Is this surviving a logout/login? Can you take a screenshot of the problem for us? Which update is responsible for this? Link to other people with the same issue if possible.

      Thanks.

  62. Dear @MenthaSuaveolens. Where I can find this extra panel, relatetd to post in November 13, 2019 at 6:30 pm? Is this a separate program in Software manager, or?… Can you please explain to me. Best regards.

    1. Hello Svetliof,

      I assume that you’re using LM-Cinnamon. Then in Files, which is Nemo, View -> Extra Pane. Using F3 toggles the extra pane.

    1. Thanks Simon,

      That looks pretty cool. It’s too late for 19.3 and I’m not sure the Update Manager is the best place for it (it seems more fitting in the driver manager, don’t forget that with mintreport, you’ll also get a tray icon to notify about possible drivers). I’ll add this to the roadmap to make sure we look at it for 20.

  63. Who – like GNOME – can organize a European Conference (GUADEC) in Mexico, has enough money to send his developers there and also to protect himself from patent accusations.

  64. Today we had an install-party in our linux-club. Installing LM is a piece of cake. Sometimes when one tries to install an application from the software-manager, one is asked multiple times for entering a password. I have seen this before on my machines myself, but today it happened also on the fresh installed computers. I guess that if one toggles the “install”-button too fast, that then multiple requests are launched. We could observe in one case that the installation was in progress, while another menu popped up to confirm the installation of the packages being installed. Is this behavior known by someone else?

    1. Yes, I too am sometimes asked to enter my password more than once when installing applications from the software manager. I have never worried about it

  65. Hi Clem

    There is a bug in the qBittorrent client that have been affecting both Linux systems and Windows for years.
    When you right-click on the icon on the panel and click Exit, it does not exit. Rather you have to click End Process (twice) in System Monitor to properly exit the app. Or you can click pause all and a wait about a minute and then click exit and it will exit properly.

    As I understand it, this is a bug within the app and not so much within the OS. Nevertheless I wonder if it is still possible to fix this bug in Linux Mint?

  66. @Clem: The Update Manager is once again working properly on my LM 19.2 Cinnamon desktop system.

    Many thanks! Merci beaucoup! Muchas gracias! Vielen Dank! Спасибо большое!

  67. I do appreciate Timeshift,
    but can we restore a formated HDD with a live USB and a Timeshift record on a second USB stick?

  68. Is Timeshift equivalent to a backup tool when all personal files are included in the snapshot?
    It seems that the answer is yes!
    What a wonderful tool !

  69. Periodically I donate $25 but I never see myself listed as a donor.

    This is not a vanity thing, but I do hope my $$$ is not somehow being lost or diverted.

  70. VLC is my choice for movies as it allows casting directly to my a via a Google Chromecast device. Absolutely never had a problem with VLC. If Celluloid can cast to through a Chromecast device, great. Otherwise, I see this as giant step backward and would have no use for it what-so-ever. It will be deleted, VLC installed.

  71. Dear LM team,

    I tested already LM19.3 Beta Cinnamon edition and I can say that it is running stable and feels snappier. I founded very useful the new System Reports.
    Great job, I hope for the next releases maybe you can take a look on the HIDPI display scale for 4K monitors.
    I have a 28″ screen and if I use 3840×2160 resolution all the icons and bars appear very small. If I activate the HIDPI everything doubles (200%) and they appear to big. Would it be possible to give an % scaling factor like 150%?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *