Gutsy should be released tomorrow and we will be looking at a brand new Ubuntu. A lot of great innovations have been implemented by the Ubuntu developers and a lot of new software made it to their repository. Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3 and Thunderbird 2.0 for instance are among them.
The Mint developers also put a lot of efforts into modernizing their tools.
MintInstall and MintDesktop should come with significant changes. MintUpdate is ready and should be included in Daryna. And finally, innovations that were put into Celena will be ported to Daryna as well, this includes for instance mintAssistant and mintUpload.
Development on Daryna itself begun and the upgrade path to Gutsy proved very tricky.
Based on the 7.10 RC release the team didn’t manage to get a stable system yet. Users are recommended to avoid upgrades to Gutsy. Among other known issues Firefox and Gdebi stop working… and sudo causes problems.
With Gutsy final being released tomorrow Daryna should become usable in the days to come and we should expect a BETA release soon enough.
The challenge for the Mint team will be the upgrade path which will eventually determine whether it’s possible to upgrade from Celena to Daryna and whether Mint still uses Ubuntu to produce the liveCDs or start generating its own.
In brief.. things look very promising but there are still a few uncertainties.