{"id":2790,"date":"2015-03-30T12:29:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T11:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=2790"},"modified":"2015-09-08T18:39:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T17:39:18","slug":"monthly-news-march-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=2790","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – March 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

The release candidate for LMDE 2 “Betsy” was announced. Bugs were fixed and we’re now getting ready for a stable release. Working on Betsy was very exciting and it paved the way for some of the work planned for Linux Mint 18 (in 2016). It also highlighted a few areas where things could be improved further, so some of Betsy’s improvements will also find their way into Linux Mint 17.2. I’d like to thank all the people who helped us test Betsy and who sent us their feedback.<\/p>\n

The team also worked on MDM (the display manager which is responsible for your login screen) and redesigned the way it detects sessions. Technical details were posted on http:\/\/segfault.linuxmint.com\/2015\/03\/better-session-detection-in-mdm-2-0<\/a>. The upcoming version 2.0 of MDM should also bring better support for encrypted home directories, in particular where it comes to language, session and avatar detection.<\/p>\n

Bugs were fixed also in mintstick (the USB formatting tool and ISO image writer) and in Cinnamon 2.4 (drag’n drop freezing issues, black bars in the screensaver, many small bug fixes). We want to test these a little more first and possibly put them in “Romeo” before we serve them to you as updates in Rebecca and Betsy.<\/p>\n

A huge amount of work went into making Cinnamon load faster. Sadly, we’re only half-way there and the results aren’t conclusive yet. On one of our test machines Cinnamon is able to load in less than a second in normal conditions, but can take up to 12 seconds to load the very fist time the computer is turned on. Investigations showed that this delay took place in cinnamon-menus and cinnamon-desktop, during the initial loading of application info (from \/etc\/xdg\/menus, \/usr\/share\/applications) and icon themes. Through optimization, the loading time was reduced from 12 seconds to 7 seconds average… which is a first step but doesn’t yet solve anything (“slow” and “slower” both feel “slow”). We’re still working on this and hoping we’ll be able to drastically reduce that initial loading time.<\/p>\n

New tools were released for Linux Mint developers and to make it easier to compile Linux Mint projects. For more info on the “mint-dev-tools”, please read http:\/\/segfault.linuxmint.com\/2015\/03\/introducing-mint-dev-tools-a-collection-of-tools-for-linux-mint-developers\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Linux Mint has a brilliant development team, but we need more artists, more photographs and more Web developers:<\/p>\n