Now.. you’re probably wondering what this is about? 🙂
As Linux Mint is becoming stable and as we’re coming to a point where we have achieved our main goals on the desktop we’re slowing down the release frequency (no Linux Mint 4.1 is planned for instance) and we’re spending more time on other editions. Coming up in the next few months we have 5 community-driven projects:
– KDE/mini KDE Edition
– XFCE Edition
– E17 Edition
– Fluxbox Edition
– miniCD Edition
So far, only two editions are officially maintained (Main and Light) and that freed our hands to invest a bit of time in R&D. So here we are now and here is what we’ll be looking at in the near future:
– Debian Edition
– Fedora Edition
– 64bit Main Edition
We started with the Debian Edition. The first reason was to show that the technology we develop is distinct from the upstream components it sits on top of and that, the same way we can change Evolution to Thunderbird, we can change Ubuntu to Debian or to Fedora and still make a great desktop. The second reason is simply that we did try most alternative components and that our selection was driven and justified by the tests we made.. so we could, for instance, appreciate the pros and cons of including Amarok instead of Rhythmbox and decide which solution was the most appropriate. This is true to a certain extent, and although we decided on Ubuntu to be our base, this decision was made without experimenting other bases. We do not plan to make our own base and do not plan to change our base to Debian or Fedora, but experimenting with these new bases will give us a better appreciation of the pros and cons related to using Ubuntu and eventually a better idea of what can be achieved in the long term or in case Ubuntu goes towards a direction we do not want to follow. And finally, the third reason was simply because we’re nerds and when we see the two brilliant distributions that Debian and Fedora are… we just can’t help ourselves to start building on top of them 🙂
So where are we at the moment with the Debian based edition?
– We have a liveCD.
– It’s based on Debian Testing
– It runs mintUpdate, mintDesktop and mintMenu
– We’re currently adding an installer to it… Ubiquity, Anaconda.. something else.. we’re having fun and experimenting 🙂
When we’re finished with this we don’t want people to use that as their main OS, but we’d like to get feedback and see how the desktop develops after a few months and how it follows the constant flow of updates brought by Debian.
Already we can tell you that much: It’s missing a lot of Ubuntu innovations (well you would have guessed that…) but oh my God … it’s so much faster!
So here we go, a little edition just to make a point, to us and to others, 100% R&D for the nerdiest of our beloved users 😉
Note: And this might come out faster than you think…
Clem