{"id":3083,"date":"2016-08-04T19:31:46","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T18:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3083"},"modified":"2016-08-04T19:31:46","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T18:31:46","slug":"monthly-news-august-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3083","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – August 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

News<\/strong><\/p>\n

For once, we’re publishing the Monthly News early.<\/p>\n

Donations<\/strong><\/p>\n

In July, we’ve received $12,753 thanks to the generous donations of 530 people. I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping us fund Linux Mint. During the attacks we were able to purchase additional servers and pay for services (some of which are now free, credits to Sucuri for sponsoring us) without ever worrying about how much things cost. We’re also able to have a budget which allows us to pay our development team. Although Mint developers are passionate and benevolent people, we send them money so that they can purchase fancy equipment or so they can be more comfortable and have more spare time (which they usually spend on improving Linux Mint anyway). They’ve no idea how much they’ll get, when and why, but they’re one of the core reasons Linux Mint gets better, so the same way you donate to Linux Mint, we love donating to them. On occasions and when something benefits the distribution in a tangible way, we’re also able to donate upstream. In preparation for Linux Mint 18, we sent money to various artists and some upstream developers. In brief, we’re extremely comfortable and free in the way we develop Linux Mint. Whenever we need something, we’re able to buy it. Whenever money can improve a particular aspect of the distribution we’re able to spend it. This frees our hands, it empowers us greatly and it makes our job much easier. I usually just say thank you and emphasize the fact that your help does help us a lot. Behind the curtain there are a lot of people involved at various degrees and doing very different things. Since we started in 2006 we never had to worry about money. We were able to grow our quality and success thanks to your enjoyment and support and we never had to feel small or revise our ambitions. You can see the effects this had on development and the decisions to maintain a new desktop environment, or lately in the decision to switch to XApps. I’m very grateful for this. Many thanks to you.<\/p>\n

KDE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike other Linux Mint editions, the KDE edition will ship with the SDDM display manager.<\/p>\n

Bad news for the nostalgic, the KDE edition will also abandon its distinctive blue Linux Mint icon and adopt the same green icon, and boot sequence as other editions.<\/p>\n

LTS kernels and stacks in Linux Mint 17.x
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Linux Mint 17.x (17, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3) the 3.16, 3.19 and 4.2 kernel series reached end-of-life, so they will no longer receive any new kernels.<\/p>\n

The following series will continue to receive new kernel versions until 2019:<\/p>\n