{"id":3620,"date":"2018-07-20T12:56:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T11:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3620"},"modified":"2018-07-20T12:56:39","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T11:56:39","slug":"monthly-news-july-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3620","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News \u2013 July 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

First of all, I’d like to thank our sponsors and all the people who sent us donations. Your help is appreciated. We’ve had to overcome tough issues since the start of this project in 2006, this last month in particular hasn’t been easy, but we’ve never had to worry about income. We often say it, but it is very true, you empower us, we’re able to focus solely on the distribution itself and it feels like a real privilege.<\/p>\n

Sleepless nights<\/strong><\/p>\n

A mistimed MESA update in Xenial temporarily broke Ubuntu and Linux Mint upgrades. We were able to block it on the 7th of July, and ask people to revert the upgrade with Timeshift. On the 9th, everything was resolved, and the upgrade path was fixed and re-opened.<\/p>\n

More recently, a grub update triggered an issue in one of our own packages. That issue could only be triggered by a new grub update and so it had gone undetected during QA and the BETA test. Although it was fixed in a matter of hours in the repositories, it still affects our installation ISO images and it breaks EFI installations when the live session is connected to the Internet. The release notes were updated to ask people to install offline. New 64-bit ISO images for Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce were produced with the fixed package and they passed QA yesterday. These new ISOs will replace the current images in the days to come.<\/p>\n

Be careful with Kernel 4.15.0-24. A critical issue<\/a> causes some computers to boot really slowly, or not to boot at all. Ubuntu is aware of it and working on a fix. We’ve also received negative feedback from the 4.15 kernel series in Mint 18.x (based on Ubuntu Xenial). Although Ubuntu decided to switch the HWE series towards it, the 4.15 series doesn’t appear to support some proprietary drivers yet (nvidia-3.04 and nvidia-340 among them).<\/p>\n

We’re also aware of regressions in the Bionic base affecting VPN, Samba, Wine (recently fixed). Ubuntu 18.04 is a brand new base and we’re sure it will settle, receive bug fixes and get more mature with time.<\/p>\n

Of course our attention is mostly focused on the problems and we quickly forget about all the improvements. We had a great Linux Mint 19 release, we also received a huge amount of positive feedback and we’ve seen many great changes when moving from 16.04 to 18.04.<\/p>\n

LMDE 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

LMDE 3 will feature 2 different installers. In addition to our own “live-installer”, you’ll also find Calamares in the application menu.<\/p>\n

Although live-installer works well and is very easy for us to maintain, troubleshoot and improve, Calamares is ahead when it comes to partitioning schemes and it provides the ability to use LUKS full-disk encryption.<\/p>\n

Both installers support BIOS and EFI installations. We’ll be interested to hear your feedback.<\/p>\n

LMDE 3 is currently in QA and its BETA release is planned for the end of the month.<\/p>\n

Cinnamon 4.0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In continuation with the “snappiness” improvements which came in Cinnamon 3.8, the team is currently looking at VSync, and in particular at CLUTTER_VBLANK which sets Sync to VBlank in Cinnamon.<\/p>\n

Although Vsync prevents screen tearing from happening, it also has a performance cost. That cost is visible in Cinnamon when dragging a window with the mouse. As you move the mouse cursor left and right, you can notice that the window which is dragged under it doesn’t move exactly “with it”, but with a slight delay, as if there was some sort of elastic band between the cursor and the window it’s holding.<\/p>\n

Removing Vsync removes that delay. Windows drags are then immediate and fully responsive. FPS measures also seem to confirm this observation and higher FPS figures lead us to believe this could have other positive impacts on Cinnamon’s performance.<\/p>\n

The problem then is screen tearing.<\/p>\n

On modern NVIDIA GPUs we’re able to get rid of screen tearing by using “Force Composition Pipeline” in NVIDIA-Settings. With Vsync disabled in Cinnamon we then enjoy a faster desktop environments with no screen tearing.<\/p>\n

The team is currently looking into this and testing on a variety of different setups and graphics cards. There’s no guarantee we’ll find a “one size fits all” solution and be able to ship a Cinnamon 4.0 environment which will be fast and without screen tearing for everybody out of the box. If we can’t we’ll probably make it easier for people to tune their environment, with more information on screen-tearing, performance and the ability to set Vsync in the System Settings.<\/p>\n

If you want to test this on your current Cinnamon setup, you can restart cinnamon with:<\/p>\n

CLUTTER_SHOW_FPS=1 cinnamon --replace<\/pre>\n
And to restart it without Vsync:<\/p>\n
CLUTTER_VBLANK=none CLUTTER_SHOW_FPS=1 cinnamon --replace<\/pre>\n
See if you see a difference in terms of FPS and when you move windows across the screen. Screen tearing, when it happens, is mostly visible in movies or when scrolling lists up and down. Test with non-fullscreen windows (full-screen windows can skip composition in Cinnamon, so that’s a different thing altogether).<\/p>\n
Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n
Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Platinum Sponsors:<\/span>
\n\"Private<\/a>
\nGold Sponsors:
\n\"Linux<\/a>
\nSilver Sponsors:
\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"Acunetix\"<\/a>
\n\"Sucuri\"<\/a>
\nBronze Sponsors:
\n\"Vault<\/a>
\n\"AYKsolutions<\/a>
\n\"7L<\/a>
\n\"Goscomb\"<\/a>
\n\"BGASoft<\/a>
\n\"David<\/a>
\n\"OpusVL\"<\/a><\/td>\n		Community Sponsors:<\/p>\n